Quotessence
Home / Authors / Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

Famous Catherine Lacey Quotes

“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.”

“He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn't working quite like it should, like he'd found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.”

“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”

“Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.”

“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.”