25 Quotes by Lucy Grealy

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.

Being different was my cross to bear, but being aware of it was my compensation.

Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was.