Lucy Grealy Quotes

17 quotes in 354 categories

• When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation,…
• Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.
• 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 used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything…
• I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking…
• 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…
• I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.
• All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.
• Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a…
• Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to…
• I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more…
• Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...
• Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.
• Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that different from the…
• The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.
• Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.
• This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from…

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