Top 100 Catherine Lacey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.”

— Catherine Lacey

3. “Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.”

— Catherine Lacey

4. “What a danger it is to love, how it warps a person from the inside, changes all the locks and loses all the keys.”

— Catherine Lacey

5. “Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.”

— Catherine Lacey

6. “I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face – not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.”

— Catherine Lacey

7. “I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn’t give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn’t seem to give you any rights at all.”

— Catherine Lacey

8. “It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone.”

— Catherine Lacey

9. “I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I’d do with it. I wouldn’t even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire.”

— Catherine Lacey

10. “I wondered why my husband couldn’t have just been all bad. Why couldn’t he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus?”

— Catherine Lacey

11. “I read somewhere that the first thing you learn when traveling is that you don’t exist – I didn’t want to stop not existing.”

— Catherine Lacey

12. “Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.”

— Catherine Lacey

13. “While the monk was brushing my hair, my eyeballs were swelling wet, and even though he was behind me he somehow sensed that swell and said that tears are an expression of attachment and attachment to an isolated being leads to suffering.”

— Catherine Lacey

14. “I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with.”

— Catherine Lacey

15. “The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.”

— Catherine Lacey

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Maybe it was just my life, my strange and always stranger life, taking all the life out of me.”

— Catherine Lacey

19. “He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.”

— Catherine Lacey

20. “No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.”

— Catherine Lacey

21. “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

22. “There’s a certain kind of woman who will notice someone’s terror and call it bravery.”

— Catherine Lacey

23. “All she ever said to me about him was You can only love a person that much once in your life, and I didn’t know enough to agree or disagree with her. What a terrible and beautiful delusion, and how sad if it’s true.”

— Catherine Lacey

24. “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

25. “She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.”

— Catherine Lacey

26. “It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.”

— Catherine Lacey

27. “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

28. “You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It’s bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn’t healthy at all.”

— Catherine Lacey

29. “Days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have.”

— Catherine Lacey

30. “I’m not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don’t need me.”

— Catherine Lacey

31. “After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn’t complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.”

— Catherine Lacey

32. “I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it – that she’d be better off not living – and how was I supposed to live after that?”

— Catherine Lacey

33. “Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure – how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn’t just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?”

— Catherine Lacey

34. “None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.”

— Catherine Lacey

35. “Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps this is true, but also, and I understand this now, I love her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone...”

— Catherine Lacey

36. “Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?”

— Catherine Lacey

37. “There are some things that only other people can do to you.”

— Catherine Lacey

38. “Then it was June and I started to feel like a new woman – not in a new-lease-on-life kind of way, more like a refinanced mortgage.”

— Catherine Lacey

39. “These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs – didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?”

— Catherine Lacey

40. “I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift.”

— Catherine Lacey

41. “I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.”

— Catherine Lacey

42. “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

43. “Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.”

— Catherine Lacey

44. “I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”

— Catherine Lacey

45. “There’s nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. You can’t just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.”

— Catherine Lacey

46. “I knew that everyone who was alive had trouble concentrating on life.”

— Catherine Lacey

47. “This was a feeling I had often, the sense of a subtext.”

— Catherine Lacey

48. “Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity?”

— Catherine Lacey

49. “Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.”

— Catherine Lacey

50. “Lately, I couldn’t remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I’d only seen the previews to.”

— Catherine Lacey