The Answers Quotes

“I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“What a danger it is to love, how it warps a person from the inside, changes all the locks and loses all the keys.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn't give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn't seem to give you any rights at all.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I barely managed to do the small talk—the what-do-you-do, the where-are-you-from, the what-neighborhood, the what-college, the despair of trying to explain oneself.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps this is true, but also, and I understand this now, I love her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone...”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“There are so many ways to live and die, so many ways to tell that same story, over and over, but everyone keeps trying to find a better way to tell it, a more real way to look into someone else's face to say, I am alive like you, was born without my consent like you, will someday die and be dead in the same way you'll be dead. What did we want from this? What did we really want from it?”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I'd do with it. I wouldn't even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Only incredibly boring people have lives that go the way they expect.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was clear then, so painfully clear, that people fell in love to find something in themselves that they'd had all along.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened to me...I try not to be so certain anymore.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure - how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn't just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“This was a feeling I had often, the sense of a subtext.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“The feeling doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn – they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“All she ever said to me about him was You can only love a person that much once in your life, and I didn't know enough to agree or disagree with her. What a terrible and beautiful delusion, and how sad if it's true.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I look back at this moment sometimes, the moment I accepted this job, and I have to wonder what kind of decision it was--the right decision that is the wrong one, or the wrong one that's actually right. Someday I hope this is clear to me, that I can find the right end, the right moral to this story. Am I the sort of person who makes life harder than it has to be? Did I actively invite all this trouble into my life or was I just doing the best I could? But it's as terrible as it is true: everyone has something in them they cannot yet see.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“The telephone hardly ever rings but when it does, there is a good chance it is someone asking me how I am, and if I really tried to answer that question I suppose I could say I'm doing as well and as terribly as I ever have been, but if you stop answering questions, people stop asking them, and if you stop answering the phone, it eventually stops ringing.
A month goes by, you think – Oh, I've finally done it.”
― Catherine Lacey, Certain American States: Stories

“She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Maybe it was just my life, my strange and always stranger life, taking all the life out of me.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I knew that this sort of love, technically, was just a neurotransmitter cocktail designed to make you feel invincible and infinite – beyond language, beyond logic – but I also knew that love was as thrilling as it was temporary, a prelude to pain, though I only knew this through reading – which is to say I had not really learned it yet and may never. That little shimmer in the chest. How simple it seems.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“we want our spouses and partners to be everything to us: a lover, a best friend, a confidant, a nurturer, an intellectual equal, sometimes a coparent, sometimes even an oblique replacement for a lost or failed parent.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“How someone wants to explain catastrophe isn't important--that's what I know now. When shit happens, it doesn't really matter what asshole is responsible.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I read somewhere that the first thing you learn when traveling is that you don't exist--I didn't want to stop not existing.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers