Quotes from Autobiography of a Face

“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

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