Quotes from 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.

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?

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.

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

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

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 often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.

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

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.

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.

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...

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

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...

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.

Reinforced to me again and again was how I was a 'brave girl' for not crying, a 'good girl' for not complaining, and soon I began defining myself this way, equating strength with silence.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

Being different was my cross to bear, but being aware of it was my compensation.

Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was.

I now possessed a large number of varied and decidedly wonderful friends, whom I valued immeasurably. Through them I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, 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, of always striving to see the truth of them.