Biography of X Quotes

“Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I have broken every rule I ever set for myself. And now I am busy, so busy, day and night, ruining my life.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Who can say who I are, how many I are, which I is the most I of my I’s?”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“There is no such thing as privacy. There is no experience or quality or thought or pain that has not been felt by all the billions of living and dead.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I was angry," he said, "and I'm still angry, but you can't really be angry with a place unless you love it. You have to love it to wish it to be better, to wish it could be different.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“--and there it was again, that useless, human blame two people will toss between each other when they become too tired or weak to carry the weight of love.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“She could not hurt me. I had no more space, at the time, to hold any new hurts.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I had ceded all control of my life to this feeling of a storm approaching and the glad certainty it would demolish everything I knew.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I'd always thought of myself a rational person, but the moment she was gone I ceased to be whoever I thought I was.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation, do you understand?” he asked. “We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“A loss tinged with shame, regret, or a sense of something unfinished is the most dangerous sort, a black-hole grief that pulls a person relentlessly toward its center, and when our lives come to one of these we are forced to bow before it or to detach completely.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Democracy is only as good as the people can make it, and we’re a country of idiots, don’t you think so?"
“I don’t think so,” Lehrer said.
“That’s because you’re an idiot, too.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I cannot remember what we spoke about, only that it felt as if we were resuming a conversation we'd been having for years. What do people ever talk about at times like this, the first meeting of years and years of meetings? 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.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“From the first moment we met in April 1989, there was an unnamable sentiment between us, one that arrived so quickly there was no moment to question it. It wasn't love, nor was it lust or obsession. It was something both visceral and beyond viscera.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“She kept losing track of the people she loved, and losing track of herself along with them.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“This cowardice, unknowingness in the face of my own feelings is why I betray those I love, verbally, when I refused to express my feelings for them.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“the trouble with knowing people is how the target keeps moving.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“X believed that making fiction was sacred...and she wanted to live in that sanctity, not to be fooled by the flimsiness of perceived reality, which was nothing more than a story that had fooled most of the world. She chose, instead, to live a life in which nothing was fixed, nothing was a given--that her name might change from day to day, moment to moment, and the same was true for her beliefs, her memories, her manner of dress, her manner of speech, what she knew, what she wanted. All of it was always being called into question. All of it was costume and none of it was solid. Not even her past was a settled matter, and though anything else around her might fluctuate, that unsettled core--her history--was to remain unsettled.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“...to proceed as if there had been [none] at all rather than reckon with a love that was impossible to resolve or fold away neatly. It is better to cut than to tear,”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Conclusions are never reached. Resolutions are never adopted. A marriage continues because it continues.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“...could she both disdain the state of this country's culture as a whole and still reasonably desire or accept its approval?”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“It must be like a kind of suicide to love a person like this, a person so edgeless. It must be like drowning.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Democracy is only as good as the people can make it, and we're a country of idiots, don't you think so?"
"I don't think so," Lehrer said.
"That's because you're an idiot, too.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“Belief is nothing until it is strained. A person may hold a belief and become emotionally attached to it long before it's ever put to the test.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I believe the world—all parts of the world—I believe it is all logical, only there is not enough time in one life to locate every explanation...We must live with the explanations we have, and respect the absences of those who are absent.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X