Top 90 Patricia Lockwood Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My drunkenness goes in six stages. There is Talkativeness, Dancing, Grammar Derangement, Showing You My Beautiful Stomach, Reading Your Tarot with Such Intensity That Both of Us Begin to Weep, and finally Blessed Unconsciousness. I’ve never hit the fourth stage so fast.”

— Patricia Lockwood

52. “I am in the house of nouns here, and it fills me with the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood.”

— Patricia Lockwood

53. “They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.”

— Patricia Lockwood

54. “At nine o’clock every night she gave up her mind. Renounced it, like a belief. Abdicated it, like a throne, all for love. She went to the freezer and opened that fresh air on her face and put fingerprints in the frost on the neck of a bottle and poured something into a glass that was very very clear. And then she was happy, though she worried every night, as you never do with knowledge, whether there would be enough.”

— Patricia Lockwood

55. “Every fiber in her being strained. She was trying to hate the police.”

— Patricia Lockwood

56. “We share the feeling that if we hang a picture or set a sentence down just right, we will instantly and painlessly ascend to the next level. We will be recognized, and the time we spent will be multiplied into forever and given back to us.”

— Patricia Lockwood

57. “Again and again, my mother proved herself to be the person you wanted with you in a crisis. She was someone who willingly went down into the underworld and came up again as pure levity.”

— Patricia Lockwood

58. “On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall. Either way, it felt like something a dude named Randy was in charge of.”

— Patricia Lockwood

59. “I couldn’t read music but music could read me. It went through me line by line and scene by scene, with one finger down the middle of the page, highlighting me recklessly.”

— Patricia Lockwood

60. “The woman next to her on the plane was reading, with that rapacious diffidence, that vacant avidity that characterized the reading of things in the portal.”

— Patricia Lockwood

61. “MY MOTHER LIGHTS like the first streetlamp when she looks at us – the coziest, homiest, most nostalgic one.”

— Patricia Lockwood

62. “The moon fell into her window and woke her.”

— Patricia Lockwood

63. “During those weeks animals came up to her on the street and pushed their soft muzzles into her palm, and she always said the same two words, never wondering whether they were a lie or not, the words that dumb things depend on us to say – because when a dog runs to you and nudges against your hand for love and you say automatically, I know, I know, what else are you talking about except the world?”

— Patricia Lockwood

64. “What, in place of these sentences, marched in the brains of previous generations? Folk rhymes about planting turnips, she guessed.”

— Patricia Lockwood

65. “I knew it was art because it drew the senses slightly out of my body, and they leaped to meet the art in the middle of the air.”

— Patricia Lockwood

66. “He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?”

— Patricia Lockwood

67. “My hands weigh a hundred pounds each and I can barely lift my head off the pillow in the mornings. The bed fills the whole room, and I lie on it and float, thinking about what I should do. The world moves its scenery back and forth in front of the window; it has nothing to do with me; it is passing me by. I lie on the bed and feel myself gently going out of print.”

— Patricia Lockwood

68. “I wanted to be where I could think, and not just anyone could look at me. I wanted to sleep in a bed that was just big enough for me and my own salvation. I wanted to choose constraint and be freed by it, after constraint was all that had ever been offered to me.”

— Patricia Lockwood

69. “We were composed of conversation, so it didn’t matter where our hands and lips and heads were. The legs we walked on were the long and shifting lists of what we loved, what we had discovered, what we could not live without.”

— Patricia Lockwood

70. “If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”

— Patricia Lockwood

71. “This is how you became someone who put the whole sky into finger quotes.”

— Patricia Lockwood

72. “AHHHHH,” like George Clooney on ER, like she was off to go slice out the tumor that had lately been pressing on the world’s optic nerve. She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”

— Patricia Lockwood

73. “Modern womanhood was more about rubbing snail mucus on your face than she had thought it would be. But it had always been something, hadn’t it? Taking drops of arsenic. Winding bandages around the feet. Polishing your teeth with lead. 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 in their whalebones;.”

— Patricia Lockwood

74. “It was so tiring to have to catch each new virus, produce the perfect sneaze of it, and then mutate it into something new.”

— Patricia Lockwood

75. “Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them – or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”

— Patricia Lockwood

76. “Couldn’t he see her arms all full of the sapphires of the instant?”

— Patricia Lockwood

77. “I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don’t; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices.”

— Patricia Lockwood

78. “When she set the portal down, the Thread tugged her back toward it. She could not help following it. This might be the one that connected everything, that would knit her to an indestructible coherence.”

— Patricia Lockwood

79. “The amount of eavesdropping that was going on was enormous, and the implications not yet known. other people’s diaries streamed around her.”

— Patricia Lockwood

80. “But it is hard, while people walk among us, to imagine their absence; while they are present, they are a bread that is passed and passed among us and never comes to an end.”

— Patricia Lockwood

81. “She could barely recall her previous life, the flights through blue rare space, the handing over of tickets and stamping of passports, the gorgeous violent ruptures of somewhere-elseness.”

— Patricia Lockwood

82. “There is still a real life to be lived, there are still real things to be done.”

— Patricia Lockwood

83. “People assume that the shutting-up made her smaller. But locking yourself up can be a way to shrink the castle down to your size, and to expand your body toward the wider limits of the walls, until you are rooted at the foundation, see sideways out the glass, and do your highest thinking with the smoke that leaves the chimney.”

— Patricia Lockwood

84. “My mother understood the fundamental facts about me. She knew that I would always prefer to eat with a tiny spoon rather than a regular one, that I was an excellent Thing Finder because I was always looking down at the sidewalk, that I wanted to recite spells, live in a nutshell, play a gold harp. That I had a house in my head that was far away. But it did not seem plausible, yet, that she and her pain had actually produced me.”

— Patricia Lockwood

85. “White people, who had the political educations of potatoes – lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish – were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”

— Patricia Lockwood

86. “It had also been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.”

— Patricia Lockwood

87. “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.”

— Patricia Lockwood

88. “At nineteen, I ought to have been in college along with the rest of my high school class, gaining fifteen pounds of knowledge and bursting the sweatpants of my ignorance. What else did people do there? Changed their names to Patchouli, became vegetarians, grew out their leg hair for the first time, got so caught up in their studies of ancient Greece that they murdered a farmer while worshipping the grape-god in the countryside.”

— Patricia Lockwood

89. “Forking it with such violence that a cucumber skidded off and landed in her lap, where it sat looking up at her like a fresh green clock.”

— Patricia Lockwood

90. “What she worried for was not just her sister’s life but her originality. She loved Star Wars so much, fur instance, that she had walked down the aisle to “The Imperial March”. Would the impulse to walk down the aisle to “The Imperial March” – which seemed the essence of survival itself, the little tune we hummed in the dark – would that make it out of whatever was happening alive?”

— Patricia Lockwood

91. “It is sweet, sometimes, to hear cliches after long days of trying to say something new.”

— Patricia Lockwood

92. “But then, almost as a serious laugh, a strength entered her voice and she stood like a tree with a spirit in it, and she opened a portal where her mouth was and spoke better than she ever had before, and as she rushed like blood back and forth in the real artery she saw that ancestors weren’t just behind, they were the ones who were to come.”

— Patricia Lockwood

93. “If you sneer at religion as the opiate of the masses, you must sneer also at the brain, because the receptors are there. You must sneer at the body, which knows how to feel that bliss. What I mean is, a sweet look of lying down in poppy fields, of feeling control finally by giving over control, a look of wild and then tame relinquishment.”

— Patricia Lockwood

94. “The room, I regret to report, is drunk. Very irresponsible of it. It’s whirling around, and it keeps flinging parishioners at me.”

— Patricia Lockwood