Catherine Lacey

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

“But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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.”

“Adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for wanting to have it all the time.”

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

“Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness.”

“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.”

“That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.”

“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.”

“I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.”

“Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.”

“He believed that all forms of government were spiritually bankrupt, that the only true way to follow Jesus was to be radically self-reliant – off every grid. The energy grid was wasteful and corrupt, and the food grid devalued and destroyed the planet, and the culture at large was full of pain and deceit, and money itself was truly evil, and even the church (or, as he would say, the corporation that calls itself the church) was the most corrupt – contaminated by money and political greed and widespread land ownership. Worst of all, they called themselves holy.”

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