Lucy Grealy Quotes

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 part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

— Lucy Grealy

“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 them.”

— Lucy Grealy

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

— 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 launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it
my face as personal vanishing point.”

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy

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

— 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

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 love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be ...

— Lucy Grealy

“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, which is what feeling ugly felt like.”

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy

“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 else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else ...”

— Lucy Grealy

“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 simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.”

— Lucy Grealy

“Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it.”

— Lucy Grealy

Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?

— Lucy Grealy

None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.

— Lucy Grealy

“When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? 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 its mark.”

— Lucy Grealy

“And knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.”

— Lucy Grealy

How could one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the softball team was anything but concurrent with the order in which Life would be handing out favors?

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy

“At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets.”

— 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 other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy

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

— Lucy Grealy