Lucy Grealy Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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
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