170 Quotes by Catherine Lacey

The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.

Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

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.

That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.

But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer.

I felt so sure then. ‘Course, I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then. The older you get the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.

I'm here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn't here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I'd been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.