Pew Catherine Lacey Quotes

Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.

A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.

Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.

The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.

I felt so sure then. ‘Course, I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then. The older you get the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …

A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.

It seems that people who belong to a large church might want that church - so vast, so many rooms - to do the believing for them, but the church is just a building. The church has no thoughts.

Can only other people tell you what your body is, or is there a way that you can know something truer about it from the inside, something that cannot be seen or explained?

When someone says they heard something you did not hear, and they know you did not hear it, then you cannot tell them they did not hear what they believe they heard. They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest. It is the loudest and most confounding emotion - wanting.

Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?

I felt this gentle urgency around her, a bruised kindness, as if something had been threatening to destroy her every day of her life and her only defense, somehow, was to remain so torn open.

I came to understand that I was not a field. I was not, today, just dirt and seed and grass. A field is a living thing. Fields began and ended. Every plant has a true name that no one had to give them. People were the end of something. The body is already dead.

There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know till it’s too late.

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

(...) lost in the idea of a disembodied world, one where ideas could hold other ideas, where thoughts could see other thoughts and death couldn’t end thoughts, where one remained alive by thinking, and was not alive if not thinking. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn’t determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another. We would not have to sleep or slam doors or exist in these cells that eat other cells and die anyway, these cells we live in.

...it's natural to go looking for the dead in new faces. But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they've become - what kind of grief is that?

I don't mean to be so negative. I know that's not what people like. Sometimes it's just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can't take back, to think about what it is...This place, you know, it's not terrible, but it's not so nice either

What a freedom that was and what a burden that was — to not have a home to go home to, and to not have a home to go home to.

Perhaps an honest feeling will always find a way to force itself through, an objector crying out in a crowd, hoping someone will hear.

I knew she was not lost to this world just because she was lost to this place.

I could hear every child in town, crying, their sorrow roaring like a heavy rain, a storm of it.

The reverend spoke a block of memorized text, nodding his head, agreeing with himself as he went.

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I've received no word from death's brother.

They touched each other so naturally, so easily, it was as if each of them had a kind of wind vane tuned for the other.

If you ever need to—and I hope you never need to, but a person cannot be sure—if you ever need to sleep, if you are ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones, and you’re walking along a dark road with no one, and you’re not sure how long you’ve been walking, and you keep looking down at your hands and not recognizing them, and you keep catching a reflection in darkened windows and not recognizing that reflection, and all you know is the desire to sleep, and all you have is no place to sleep, one thing you can do is look for a church.

(...) is a good woman, but she gets overwhelmed by other people. She has to be careful of that. Taking care of others, it takes something, you know? It takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

He laughed lightly, but only for a moment, and when I looked at him, I could see the part of Roger that never moved. Too much light will blind you, too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

I leaned back across the table and shut my eyes and thought that at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us, maybe, or maybe even after the next creatures had been replaced by whatever came after them, at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human? - though it would be in some unforeseen language, perhaps a language that was without sound, perhaps a language that did not have to grow from a damp, contaminated mouth - and if this question ever did arise in that future being's mind, would it even be possible to catalog and make sense of all our griefs, our pains and wars? Our delineations? Our need for order? The question arose then - did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything?

It must be that I - whatever I am - am lying on the floor of a canoe, lying there, looking up at the sky. I am unable to sit up or move. I cannot remember getting into the canoe. Sometimes I hear people speaking to the canoe as if they are not aware that I am in here. Yes, that's what it feels like, what living feels like.

Somehow our bodies wouldn't hold us back the way they do here. Somehow our bodies wouldn't determine our lives, the lives of others, the ways in which one life could or could not meet the life of another.

She has to be careful of that. Taking care of others. It takes something, you know, it takes something from you to take care of another person and there’s only so much a person has to give.

I don’t know why it is a person can feel so misplaced, even from the beginning, you know—even as a little child I felt there had been some kind of accident that got me born here. I guess my mother, the whole family, really, felt the same way, that there had been some sort of mistake.

Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is.

This place, you know, it’s not so terrible, but it’s not so nice either.

Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

But at some point you have to ask yourself, Roger said, whether remaining silent is something that is having a positive effect or a negative one on your life. You have to ask yourself whether it’s something you’re doing or something that’s being done to you, from the inside, from something else.

In our silence I felt as if something had been given back to me that I’d lost a long time ago.

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

Sometimes I think I might be writing a letter to sleep, that I might be asking him if he remembers me, if he ever plans on coming back. I’ve received no word from death’s brother.

How could I still be in this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?

It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

The house became still and more still and stiller still.

I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?

I stood and walked away, and once I was I was one step away from her, I was as alone as I had ever been but I also knew that Annie- this Annie who answers to Annie but has a truer name- I knew she was not lost to this world just because she was lost to this place.

It is the loudest and most confounding emotion—wanting.

It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting. I don't want it to be so—but every year, just before it begins, I start to feel this way. And then what? I forget about it.

it’s natural to go looking for the dead in new faces. But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?