Quotes from Lucy Grealy

Living in a country where I didn't speak the language suited me just fine. Everything was an adventure, including buying milk at the corner store. I developed the art of getting lost... It was a safe kind of chaos, and at some point that I was cultivating my 'aloneness' in this strange place as a method for putting off loneliness.

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. . . Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.

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

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?

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

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

When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol seemed to shift frequently and without advance notice. One day, out of milk was a problem easily dealt with, but on the next it was a symbol of her children's selfishness, our father's failure, and her tragic, wasted life.

Though I knew I'd lost weight and was a bit pale, I never considered myself all that sick. I thought of myself as separate from them because of what I'd gone through, but it didn't occur to me until then that people might actually pity me. The idea appalled me.

I witnessed my life unfolding like someone who has awkwardly stumbled in after the movie has started. I sensed that something important had been revealed in the opening sequence, some essential knowledge everyone else was privy to that was being kept from me.

as if foreknowledge of an event could somehow buffer you from its reverbrations.

I boiled every equation down to these simple terms: was I lovable or was I ugly?