170 Quotes by Catherine Lacey

It was clear then, so painfully clear, that people fell in love to find something in themselves that they’d had all along.

What a danger it is to love, how it warps a person from the inside, changes all the locks and loses all the keys.

And it’s still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn’t want to feel and why that person doesn’t feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve.

Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France.

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.

There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened to me... I try not to be so certain anymore.

What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?

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.

Eventually she got out of bed, took a long shower, gargling and spitting mouthfuls of water, then screaming, just a little and quietly.