Autobiography of a Face Quotes

“Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it...which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be...”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else...”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only October. Halloween was approaching. Coming from Ireland, we had never thought of it as a big holiday, though Sarah and I usually went out trick-or treating. For the last couple of years I had been too sick to go out, but this year Halloween fell on a day when I felt quiet fine. My mother was the one who came up with the Eskimo idea. I put on a winter coat, made a fish out of paper, which I hung on the end of a stick, and wrapped my face up in a scarf. My hair was growing in, and I loved the way the top of the hood rubbed against it. By this time my hat had become part of me; I took it off only at home. Sometimes kids would make fun of me, run past me, knock my hat off, and call me Baldy. I hated this, but I assumed that one day my hair would grow in, and on that day the teasing would end.

We walked around the neighborhood with our pillowcase sacks, running into other groups of kids and comparing notes: the house three doors down gave whole candy bars, while the house next to that gave only cheap mints. I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Being different was my cross to bear, but being aware of it was my compensation.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Living in a country where I didn't speak the language suited me just fine. Everything was an adventure, including buying milk at the corner store. I developed the art of getting lost... It was a safe kind of chaos, and at some point that I was cultivating my 'aloneness' in this strange place as a method for putting off loneliness.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I now possessed a large number of varied and decidedly wonderful friends, whom I valued immeasurably. Through them I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be, of always striving to see the truth of them.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“and knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark. . . Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I knew his whole being. There was not one part of his body I could not touch, not one part of his personality I did not know at least as well as my own. When we went on long rides through the woods, I would tell him everything I knew and then explain why I loved him so much, why he was special, different from other horses, how I would take care of him for the rest of his life, never leave him or let anyone hurt him. After the ride I would take him to graze in an empty field. I would lie down on his broad bare back and think I was the luckiest girl alive, his weight shifting beneath me as he moved toward the next bite of grass. Sometimes I took him to the stream and laughed as he pawed at the water, screaming in delight when I tried to lie down in it. Best of all was when I happened to find him lying down in his stall. Carefully, so as not to spook him, I'd creep in and lie down on top of his giant body, his great animal heat and breath rising up to swallow my own smaller heat and less substantial air.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“I viewed other people both critically and sympathetically. Why couldn't they just stop complaining so much, just let go and see how good they actually had it? Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen that would allow them to move forward, waiting for some shadowy future moment to begin their lives in earnest...I wanted them to stop, to see how much they already had, how they had their health and their strength. I imagined how my life would be if I had half their fortune. Then I would catch myself, guilty of exactly the thing I was accusing others of.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“the ball over the side. I loved nothing better than to run and stare at its lostness in the churning water far below. The chaos held me tightly, endlessly. One day Sarah drank a glass of cream instead of milk and was sick all over the place; another time we were invited to a children’s party in the gigantic ballroom, and I won a prize at Duck Duck Goose. In the ship’s gym there was an electric horse and a peculiar machine with a large strap that vigorously jiggled the fat atoms in your bottom to smithereens. The most predictable memory of all, the Statue of Liberty, draws a complete blank, but I remember looking up and simultaneously hoping and fearing that”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face

“The second week of chemo was worse in that I knew what to expect. This presented a curious reversal of fear for me, because I already understood that with other types of pain the fear of not knowing about it usually brought about more suffering than the thing itself. This was different. This was dread. It wasn’t some unknown black thing hovering and threatening in the shadows; it had already revealed itself to me and, knowing that I knew I couldn’t escape, took its time stalking me. This was everything I ever needed to know about Fate.”
― Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face