“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people...”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? 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 mark.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“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.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“and knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“I now possessed a large number of varied and decidedly wonderful friends, whom I valued immeasurably. Through them I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, 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, of always striving to see the truth of them.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“How could one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the softball team was anything but concurrent with the order in which Life would be handing out favors?”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol seemed to shift frequently and without advance notice. One day, out of milk was a problem easily dealt with, but on the next it was a symbol of her children's selfishness, our father's failure, and her tragic, wasted life.”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
“I boiled every equation down to these simple terms: was I lovable or was I ugly?”
― Lucy Grealy, quote from Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy
Born place: in Dublin, Ireland
Born date June 3, 1963
See more on GoodReads
“The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
“Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, quote from Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
“All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough...the fact will prevail through the universe...but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall so: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...”
― Walt Whitman, quote from Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition
“ALICE was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do:”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories
“I couldn't help thinking how good I'd had it, until now - the fact that love had always been a pleasure and never a pain. I had never been forced, nor had I ever had to force myself. Everything had been good the way it was.”
― quote from A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
As You Wish
Dragon Wing
This Dark Endeavor
Proxy
The Complete Poems
FatedBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
