Catherine Lacey

“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.”

“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.”

“I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, 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.”

“He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.”

“Will I ever stop being surprised by the ways people make hell?”

“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.”

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

“And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.”

“Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone.”

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

“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.”

“The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world.”