I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords, and I am unable to deal with that shift.

— Catherine Lacey

I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.

— Catherine Lacey

I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.

— Catherine Lacey

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.

— Catherine Lacey

Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.

— Catherine Lacey

Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone.

— Catherine Lacey

Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.

— Catherine Lacey

Maybe misery begins everywhere.

— Catherine Lacey

Moments never stay, whether you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

— Catherine Lacey

My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.

— Catherine Lacey