Top 100 Catherine Lacey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he’d like to become part of a story, any story.”

— Catherine Lacey

52. “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

53. “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

54. “He didn’t care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his.”

— Catherine Lacey

55. “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

56. “I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.”

— Catherine Lacey

57. “You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.”

— Catherine Lacey

58. “What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.”

— Catherine Lacey

59. “It was clear then, so painfully clear, that people fell in love to find something in themselves that they’d had all along.”

— Catherine Lacey

60. “What is the point of love? To distract us.”

— Catherine Lacey

61. “A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.”

— Catherine Lacey

62. “Eventually she got out of bed, took a long shower, gargling and spitting mouthfuls of water, then screaming, just a little and quietly.”

— Catherine Lacey

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God.”

— Catherine Lacey

66. “It seemed that my identity had necessarily split, that I’d turned into a different person. I could look at her now and see all that stoic ferocity in her eyes, how she wanted to do something that could never be undone. Something permanent. Some little forever. But I’m not interested in forever. Not anymore.”

— Catherine Lacey

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

— Catherine Lacey

68. “I knew that this sort of love, technically, was just a neurotransmitter cocktail designed to make you feel invincible and infinite – beyond language, beyond logic – but I also knew that love was as thrilling as it was temporary, a prelude to pain, though I only knew this through reading – which is to say I had not really learned it yet and may never. That little shimmer in the chest. How simple it seems.”

— Catherine Lacey

69. “He laughed lightly, but only for a moment, and when I looked at him, I could see the part of Roger that never moved. Too much light will blind you, too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.”

— Catherine Lacey

70. “No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.”

— Catherine Lacey

71. “It felt possible – though I know this is absurd – that the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed.”

— Catherine Lacey

72. “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

73. “There is a certain kind of person who, when insulted, will assume you have something they need.”

— Catherine Lacey

74. “It seems to me that we can be the angriest with those we love most – what a curse, what a trick.”

— Catherine Lacey

75. “Only incredibly boring people have lives that go the way they expect.”

— Catherine Lacey

76. “Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.”

— Catherine Lacey

77. “Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France.”

— Catherine Lacey

78. “I sat up and again looked at the picture of the man who owned the ocean and wished I could please become him now, pinch my nose, close my eyes, and jump into some other life.”

— Catherine Lacey

79. “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.”

— Catherine Lacey

80. “There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened to me... I try not to be so certain anymore.”

— Catherine Lacey

81. “I thought of all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going. All those people, getting in the way of each other – how do we even stand it? How do we make our way around?”

— Catherine Lacey

82. “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

83. “It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church – so vast, so many rooms – to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts.”

— Catherine Lacey

84. “When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion – wanting.”

— Catherine Lacey

85. “What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?”

— Catherine Lacey

86. “There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know till it’s too late.”

— Catherine Lacey

87. “Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it’s easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see.”

— Catherine Lacey

88. “I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is... This place, you know, it’s not terrible, but it’s not so nice either.”

— Catherine Lacey

89. “The reverend spoke a block of memorized text, nodding his head, agreeing with himself as he went.”

— Catherine Lacey

90. “I felt so sure then. ‘Course, I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then. The older you get the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.”

— Catherine Lacey

91. “Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?”

— Catherine Lacey

92. “Sometimes it seems all I have are questions, that I will ask the same ones all my life. I’m not sure if I even want any answers, don’t think I’d have a use for them, but I do know I’d give anything to be another person – anyone else – for even just a day, an hour. There’s something about that distance I’d do anything to cross.”

— Catherine Lacey

93. “Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.”

— Catherine Lacey

94. “Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.”

— Catherine Lacey

95. “I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.”

— Catherine Lacey

96. “A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to bow before it or to detach completely.”

— Catherine Lacey

97. “People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.”

— Catherine Lacey

98. “I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew.”

— Catherine Lacey

99. “I cannot remember what we spoke about, only that it felt as if we were resuming a conversation we’d been having for years. What do people ever talk about at times like this, the first meeting of years and years of meetings? It seems at such times that we are the least in a hurry to explain ourselves, intuitively knowing there is time to get to all of it, that there is plenty of time.”

— Catherine Lacey

100. “I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.”

— Catherine Lacey