37 Quotes by Patricia Lockwood

The question for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Baileys Irish Cream liqueur out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken.

If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.

Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?

Who among us is not the great I AM? Who among us doesn’t live in a nightgown or some other bare-ass outfit at the center of his own wide sky – shining, unchanging, without beginning or end, a word in the east and a body in the west?

Whenever someone says the word “month” to me, I call up an empty square filled with other empty squares, days, and hours and minutes, bricks on bricks spiraling inward, pinwheel and diamond, and herringbone patterns marching smaller and smaller to some vanishing point.

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.

He entertained himself by slipping increasingly outrageous puns into the copy, which culminated in a headline about a dachshund race that read, “All Wieners in the Long Run.

Sometimes I have thought I was lonely and it turned out I was in reality wanting a snack, just like sometimes I have thought I was mad and it turned out I was actually wearing too many sweaters.