“It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.”
— Catherine Lacey
“It’s disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie, but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake.”
— Catherine Lacey
“The feeling doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn – they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.”
— Catherine Lacey
“But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we’d be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.”
— Catherine Lacey
“It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn’t in love, wasn’t in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.”
— Catherine Lacey
“She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.”
— Catherine Lacey
“But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?”
— Catherine Lacey
“I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn’t get many of them because I didn’t make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren’t edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.”
— Catherine Lacey
“That’s the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for wanting to have it all the time.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I couldn’t decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.”
— Catherine Lacey
“My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don’t have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn’t know what else to do with.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.”
— Catherine Lacey
“He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.”
— Catherine Lacey
“These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs – didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?”
— Catherine Lacey
“I wasn’t sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Will I ever stop being surprised by the ways people make hell?”
— Catherine Lacey
“The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity?”
— Catherine Lacey
“I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn’t meant for it.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.”
— Catherine Lacey