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“Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I'm not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don't need me.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“[...] being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“if you’re raised with an angry man in your house,
there will always be an angry man in your house.
you will find him even when he is not there.
and if one day you find that there is
no angry man in your house—
well, you will go find one and invite him in!”
― Cut“Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love— and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria— and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame— and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …”
― Pew“I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I've discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this—I'm not a brain-machine fixer, I'm just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?”
― Pew“And this is the difference between me and the rest of the world: most people can let their feelings shift without a wildebeest smashing them up from the inside, but I, for some reason, cannot—and, still, I am more human than wildebeest so I’ll never be exempt from the human need for other people to be near, but because I am part wildebeest they can’t be too near, and I would like to apologize for that but I can’t apologize for that, I can’t apologize to everyone who deserves an apology for it, unless no one deserves anything, in which case, what a relief, because I can give everyone that nothing—I can give them nothing all day.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.”
― Pew“That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
― The Answers“Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.”
― Pew“And I knew that it was possible he wasn't entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“There's nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. You can't just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.”
― Pew“if you're raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. you will find him even when he is not there.”
―“Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.”
― The Answers“The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.”
― Pew“I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything's, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is -- big hole full of things chewing each other -- and it's odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they're really after as they stare -- that ferocious pulse under all things placid.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“It's disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie, but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing“I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift.”
― Nobody Is Ever Missing
Friday, January 05, 2024
Catherine Lacey
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