Lucy Grealy

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the…

— Lucy Grealy

“When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol…

— Lucy Grealy

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

— Lucy Grealy

Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that…

— Lucy Grealy

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and…

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.

— Lucy Grealy

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives…

— Lucy Grealy

“Reinforced to me again and again was how I was a ‘brave girl’ for not crying, a ‘good girl’ for not complaining,…

— Lucy Grealy

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.

— Lucy Grealy

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

— Lucy Grealy

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant…

— Lucy Grealy

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the…

— Lucy Grealy

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...

— Lucy Grealy

“The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only…

— Lucy Grealy

“I boiled every equation down to these simple terms: was I lovable or was I ugly?”

— Lucy Grealy

I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to…

— Lucy Grealy

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great…

— Lucy Grealy

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as…

— Lucy Grealy

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing…

— Lucy Grealy

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.

— Lucy Grealy

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was…

— Lucy Grealy

“Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have…

— Lucy Grealy