Nobody Is Ever Missing Quotes

“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.”
― Catherine Lacey, 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.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“He didn't care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“But we always avoided talking about these things—difficult things—and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, 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.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“People in large quantities are terrible.”
― catherine lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I wondered why my husband couldn't have just been all bad. Why couldn't he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus?”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she'd be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn't working quite like it should, like he'd found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that—”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I'm here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn't here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I'd been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“We did not exist, the we we thought we'd always be.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Maybe misery begins everywhere.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“. . . waiting for . . . some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me, Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow will be fine. But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him—we were both unable to get near the real life in life.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“This wasn't a commodifiable realization, the kind of thing in college essays or inspirational books or the hardbound journals of gentle ladies. There was no ah, no ha, no relaxation or humor folded into this realization. There was just something real in my head—a rescue boat in a sea where there was no one left to save.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing