170 Quotes by Catherine Lacey

While the monk was brushing my hair, my eyeballs were swelling wet, and even though he was behind me he somehow sensed that swell and said that tears are an expression of attachment and attachment to an isolated being leads to suffering.

I’m not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don’t need me.

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.

I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other’s vicinity?

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn’t complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.

Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.

Then it was June and I started to feel like a new woman – not in a new-lease-on-life kind of way, more like a refinanced mortgage.