Lucy Grealy Quotes
Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.
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.
Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.
Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.
Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.
I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.
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.
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
All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.
The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.
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.
