Stories in the Worst Way Quotes

“From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“Because some days the world holds true at the drop of a hat, don't you find? Things favor themselves: whatever you reach for - a shimmered arm, or parts unknown - is ready, finally, to have itself be handled.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out.

What was wrong was very simple.

Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“I sang the way I still talk.
Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“One day, we were led into a high-ceilinged room and told that everything had already been done for us, that nothing had been spared or held back, that we had been born for no reason other than for hair to have an extra place to grow in the world. A hand pointed to the wide route the hair was already starting to take down our calves. If you cut it, we were told, it will come back. It will haunt.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“We had the same oily skin, dripping and dark. We were warned never to let our hands land on our cheeks or our foreheads, told that our blotting fingerpads would make things only worse. By the end of the day, our faces would appear to be entirely behind water. It was just the rain combing back out of us, we were told. By morning, the pillowcases would be moist with our heatdrops.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“There were different ways we did not come into our own.
We were warm-armed, hot-handed girls. Our palms burned. We made fists around ice cubes, or squeezed anything else frozen—boxes of vegetables, foiled cuts of meat. When they thawed, we exiled them to the freezer again, reached for whatever had collected a fresh crust of frost.”
― Garielle Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way

“I got used to being one of sleep's discards.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way