Biography of X

by Catherine Lacey

(How odd to remember the face of someone I hate, when so much else is lost to the mess of memory.)

I have no interest in the flattery of a fool.

It seems at such times that we are the least in a hurry to explain ourselves, intuitively knowing there is time to get to all of it, that there is plenty of time.

one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.

the passing years transformed my prior pride into embarrassment, as I feared the piece had been a fluke and I was not a real journalist and thus I had not earned any of the laurels that work had laid upon me.)

As a creative person, I feel this.

regret was an emotion that could only bend someone backward, that it had no use except as a self-poison.

“We are a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives.”

Women give love an independent value, while men give it an instrumental one.’

You could argue, of course, that physical beauty indicates nothing of any depth about a person, yet few can avoid falling under its spell.

how powerfully you can love someone and still not need to marry them.

“We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.”