Nobody Is Ever Missing Quotes

“. . . 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

“I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself — but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I slung my backpack on, walked down an alley, put my backpack down, and crouched over it to have an almost-human moment. I felt like I got close to being a rational person right then, phlegm dripping in my throat, face turning red. In this situation, any rational person would be hurt, would feel lost, and being hurt and feeling lost would cause her to do a real thing, to really cry. A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset. Her feelings would show up in her body as if she had no choice in the matter and this would cause her to realize she needed to find a way back to her home, to her real life that was somehow going on without her.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I tried to look at Ruby with some kind of tenderness but I think it came out as condescension and I couldn’t feel my face, I couldn’t feel my face wrapped around my head, and I couldn’t feel the muscles in it and make them move in the right way. I was trapped in my body and Ruby was trapped in her body and we’d always been trying to bridge the difference between our bodies, atone for the fact that we were supposed to be family but we weren’t, not really, but we had to try anyway, try forever over and over again to find the way that we were related.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I almost wanted to know more about them, how they all met, why they seemed to have a uniform, what they had against shoes, but the desire to know more was overridden by the knowledge that to get that information I would have to actually speak with them a substantial amount and that they might have questions about me and that it might be difficult to extract myself from such a situation.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“(...) Porque debes parecer joven para poder enfrentarte con éxito a la vulnerabilidad que implica permanecer en el arcén de la carretera mostrando la parte inferior del antebrazo. Has de parecer por completo inofensiva y al tiempo capaz, si es necesario, de clavar un cuchillo en cualquier tripa.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Señalé hacia el sur, o creo que señalé hacia el sur, pero podía haber sido el oeste, e incluso el norte, ¿y qué importaba? Si das las vueltas suficientes, acabas en el mismo sitio.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“(...) El tiempo es algo que siempre está a punto de ser algo que nunca está aquí y nunca transcurre y nunca es tuyo y nunca es de nadie, y todos intentamos agarrarlo y apretarlo con la mano y nadie lo consigue, de manera que es imposible alcanzar una tregua, ¿verdad, Tiempo? No lo pregunto, simplemente lo digo: estoy llegando a una tregua con el tiempo.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Memories are so often made by one hand, and deleted by the other, and living is a long churn of making and deleting and we all forget so much of what we could be remembering”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing