170 Quotes by Catherine Lacey

A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.

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.

Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.

I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is... This place, you know, it’s not terrible, but it’s not so nice either.

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.

It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church – so vast, so many rooms – to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts.

You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It’s bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn’t healthy at all.

He laughed lightly, but only for a moment, and when I looked at him, I could see the part of Roger that never moved. Too much light will blind you, too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

Days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have.