Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
27 quotes
"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."
"Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?"
"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."
"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."
"I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love."
"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."
"That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day."
"I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn't get many of them because I didn't make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren't edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes."
"But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives."
"It's disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie, but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake."
"And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled."
"Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to."
"I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she'd be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?"
"None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough."
"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."
"I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself."
"Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them."
"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."
"Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have."
"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."
"I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story."
"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."
"Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use."
"Though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn't have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow."
"Moments never stay, whether or not 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."