Lucy Grealy
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.Collection: Wisdom
I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Beautiful
Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people.Collection: Jobs
Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.Collection: Defined
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.Collection: Vanishing
Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Demand
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.Collection: Pain
Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me.Collection: Animal
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 markCollection: Moving
Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life.Collection: Self
All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.Collection: Hopeful
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?Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Thinking
The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for.Collection: Nostalgia