Top 90 Patricia Lockwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you cannot pinpoint a pain in your body, the whole world seems to throb with it. Trees in pain, lit windows in pain, Wednesday nights in pain. Pianos flaming with pain, and the scale sliding up into a cry.”

— Patricia Lockwood

2. “He entertained himself by slipping increasingly outrageous puns into the copy, which culminated in a headline about a dachshund race that read, “All Wieners in the Long Run.”

— Patricia Lockwood

3. “Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?”

— Patricia Lockwood

4. “A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words.”

— Patricia Lockwood

5. “When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.”

— Patricia Lockwood

6. “This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.”

— Patricia Lockwood

7. “Most letters were love letters until they were not.”

— Patricia Lockwood

8. “The Flat Earth Society announced it had members all over the globe.”

— Patricia Lockwood

9. “It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”

— Patricia Lockwood

10. “My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.”

— Patricia Lockwood

11. “How do god fit him ass in them jeans when he is, in fact, Everywhere.”

— Patricia Lockwood

12. “Sometimes I have thought I was lonely and it turned out I was in reality wanting a snack, just like sometimes I have thought I was mad and it turned out I was actually wearing too many sweaters.”

— Patricia Lockwood

13. “All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.”

— Patricia Lockwood

14. “I thought a voice had to be about your fluency, your dexterity, your virtuosity. But in fact your voice could be about your failings, your falterings, your physical limits. The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.”

— Patricia Lockwood

15. “If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”

— Patricia Lockwood

16. “Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn’t live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky – shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?”

— Patricia Lockwood

17. “Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.”

— Patricia Lockwood

18. “And for you, I think, a religious life,′ she said, a calm certainty all over her crisscrossed face. She didn’t even bother with a question mark. My calling was so obvious; it was written all over me. Two years later, I would be living in my own convent as an order of one, typing poetry in the deep glowing hours to a stranger. Four close walls and cathedral space within, arriving with a rush to myself every moment.”

— Patricia Lockwood

19. “The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?”

— Patricia Lockwood

20. “Whenever someone says the word “month” to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point.”

— Patricia Lockwood

21. “He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.”

— Patricia Lockwood

22. “As they perform this ritual, I almost have to turn away, thinking again what a boomeranging, out-of-body experience it is to watch a religious childhood from the outside, when before I was in the very marrow of it.”

— Patricia Lockwood

23. “One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage – that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.”

— Patricia Lockwood

24. “Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part where they all sat around in restaurants.”

— Patricia Lockwood

25. “You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” Rebecca West said that. You must also believe that it is as high, and as low, as strained to the breaking, and that the silence before and after it is as sweet.”

— Patricia Lockwood

26. “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.”

— Patricia Lockwood

27. “It was so easy to believe you freely chose the paints, polishes, and waist trainers of your own time, while looking back with tremendous pity to women of the past and their whale bones that you took the longest strides your body was capable of while women of the past limped forward on broken arches.”

— Patricia Lockwood

28. “I was just thinking that you and I... have seen very different memes in our lives.”

— Patricia Lockwood

29. “There was a new toy. Everyone was making fun of it, but then it was said to be designed for autistic people, and then no one made fun of it anymore, but made fun of the people who were making fun of it previously.”

— Patricia Lockwood

30. “The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.”

— Patricia Lockwood

31. “Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that so steadfastly refused to care for her?”

— Patricia Lockwood

32. “The feeling of getting an email! As if the ghost of a passenger pigeon had flown into your home and delivered it directly into your head, so swooping and unexpected and feathered was the feeling.”

— Patricia Lockwood

33. “It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.”

— Patricia Lockwood

34. “In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis. Was this always how it happened?”

— Patricia Lockwood

35. “A reporter had once asked the unabomber if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison. “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general.”

— Patricia Lockwood

36. “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean.”

— Patricia Lockwood

37. “The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”

— Patricia Lockwood

38. “The year has been long. I feel like a single particle standing in the middle of my own ghost, I resemble a log of haunted cookie dough, and I need to be cured of myself.”

— Patricia Lockwood

39. “I just don’t want people to be scared of her,” her sister had said when they first received the diagnosis, but now that the baby was here the whole family had turned to a huge blue defiant stare that moved as a part through the waves, with the fear of the world curling tall on either side of them. They wanted – what? – to take the sun by the face and force it down: Look at her! Look! Shine on her! Shine! Shine!”

— Patricia Lockwood

40. “The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller by one ray.”

— Patricia Lockwood

41. “Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.”

— Patricia Lockwood

42. “Context collapse! That sounded pretty bad, didn’t it? And also like the thing that was happening to the honeybees?”

— Patricia Lockwood

43. “The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word. It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.”

— Patricia Lockwood

44. “But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.”

— Patricia Lockwood

45. “Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most. Who picked up the slang the earliest. To show – what? That they were not like the others? That they knew what was worth stealing? They were the guiltiest too. But guilt was not worth anything.”

— Patricia Lockwood

46. “The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on.”

— Patricia Lockwood

47. “You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon.”

— Patricia Lockwood

48. “Start small and work your way up,” her therapist suggested. “Start by hating Officer Big Mac, a class traitor who is keeping the other residents of McDonaldland from getting the sandwiches that they need, and who when the revolution comes will have the burger of his head eaten for his crimes.” But this insight produced in her only a fresh wave of discouragement. Her therapist was more radical than her?”

— Patricia Lockwood

49. “Something in the back of her head hurt. It was her new class consciousness.”

— Patricia Lockwood

50. “Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.”

— Patricia Lockwood