Lucy Grealy QUOTES

1 " I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch. "

― Lucy Grealy

2 " Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? "

― Lucy Grealy

3 " 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

4 " At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets. "

― Lucy Grealy

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " None of us understood that the body is a connected thing. "

― Lucy Grealy , Autobiography of a Face

8 " I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for. "

― Lucy Grealy

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people... "

― Lucy Grealy , Autobiography of a Face

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " Reinforced to me again and again was how I was a ‘brave girl’ for not crying, a ‘good girl’ for not complaining, and soon I began defining myself this way, equating strength with silence. "

― Lucy Grealy

20 " 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

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