170 Quotes by Catherine Lacey

There are some things that only other people can do to you.

. . . waiting for . . . some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me, Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow will be fine. But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.

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.

What I'd said wasn't any kind of honesty, but 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.

Perhaps I had just ruined it by reading Barthes at the wrong time. (A Lover’s Discourse, Chandra said, was relationship poison.)

What is the point of love? To distract us.

Such photographs, once rare, now common, had ceased to be points of debate, and were now understood as utterances of reality itself.And anyway, perhaps Enid should not become one of those people who tangles the world with details, with insistence, with arguments against reality. Things don’t go well for those people with all their wanting and asking.

Even they had to admit that this was simply how progress occurs, that every generation is liberated and obliterated by what they’ve never known.

Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure – how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn’t just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?