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 …

- Lucy Grealy

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

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

- Lucy Grealy

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.

- Lucy Grealy

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

- Lucy Grealy

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launc…

- Lucy Grealy

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

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 acce…

- Lucy Grealy

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