The Answers Quotes

“I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I barely managed to do the small talk—the what-do-you-do, the where-are-you-from, the what-neighborhood, the what-college, the despair of trying to explain oneself.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I thought that if I could ever do a background check on myself, I knew exactly what I'd do with it. I wouldn't even read it, just take it somewhere sacred and set it on fire.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“This was a feeling I had often, the sense of a subtext.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Maybe it was just my life, my strange and always stranger life, taking all the life out of me.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“There are some things that only other people can do to you.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Sometimes it seems all I have are questions, that I will ask the same ones all my life. I'm not sure if I even want any answers, don't think I'd have a use for them, but I do know I'd give anything to be another person—anyone else—for even just a day, an hour. There's something about that distance I'd do anything to cross.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“. . . overcast afternoons when it seemed possible the whole world had run out of things to say.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Though he felt a little guilt over disappearing, it wasn't even guilt, just sadness over not even wanting to call her.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Ed began explaining this Yo La Tengo thing, how he was listening to a record of theirs, on vinyl he emphasized, and he'd been thinking about a genre of music called shoegaze something about the body language of the shoegazer, the perpetual crumpling or downward slope of the gazer's neck, and then he changed the subject, abruptly, to nettle root—had I ever taken nettle root? I was in a subdued, semi-meditative state, but he repeated himself, louder—Mary, have you ever taken nettle root?—and I said, Um, no, to which he immediately began chanting.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I think back to this moment sometimes now, look back at that person I was, months before I couldn't unknow what had happened.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“And how sad it is that the last face someone makes at you is always the face you remember the most.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“I had nothing to say to these strangers, whoever or whatever they were.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“The late-afternoon light was thick and orange and she passed four different couples taking photos of themselves on the same cobblestoned block, all their loves endlessly recorded and reviewed, ever and ever, a little archive of two.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Will your dad beat me up if I ask for your number?

She wrote it down, smiling, feeling somehow significant and uncomfortable, a nervousness that stiffened her face.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers