The Graceview Patient Quotes

“The mind abhors chaos. It cannot abide randomness. It needs a narrative, one event after another, reason and cause and effect. When life is at its most incomprehensible, the mind clings to narrative the tightest”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“Do you know what that feels like? To knowingly say, I can’t take this job that buys me food because I hurt too much, I’m too exhausted, and if I push any harder it’ll get worse, not better? My parents don’t. The few friends I’d managed to keep through a few cross-country moves didn’t. Sympathy and support were drying up, and I could barely get out of bed somedays, my body attacking itself with all the energy I didn’t have to stop it.”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“I couldn’t see it then, but I can now: I was dreaming. Or having some strange drug-induced hallucination, but there isn’t much difference between the two. The mechanism only matters as far as it answers this question: Was what I saw real?”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“With each bite, I thought about being sick. About all the different things those words could encompass. Most of the people in my life weren’t quite sure how to categorize me. When I first started having problems, sick came easily to their lips. But now, with it so settled in, without the trappings of contagion or an easily parsed diagnosis of cancer, was I sick?

Was I making myself sick now?

Would I only be sick if I came down with some cold? If I developed pneumonia? What if I just got a UTI from not wanting to get up to pee on the days I was so exhausted I could barely chew?”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“They’d keep me safe. All I had to do was let them have full access to my body.”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“A hospital is an organism, too. The people in it keep it clean, keep it fed, keep it alive.”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient

“I didn’t expect any VIP treatment. I wasn’t sure I wanted it, either. It was— ambitious. Too confident. It said, We know we can fix you, and I knew that was a lie.”
― Caitlin Starling, The Graceview Patient