Catherine Lacey

A Novel

Biography of X

B.A. Bacigal

No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

The price of having an identity is the inability to transform it.

description of looking at an image of her wife and her wife's ex, seemingly elated, knowing their relationship fell apart yet still being jealous of the (even falsely) percieved happiness

the image was a powerful fiction, made only more powerful by how little reality it contained.

No one will ever love you passionately for being nice.

Clara Gauthier

I fear I am the sort of person who needs to feel some measure of fear in order to love someone. My first love had been—privately, embarrassingly—God itself, something that made me, something that could destroy me, every mortal relation that came after, until her, had always fallen short of the total metaphysical satisfaction I’d felt in prayer. 

Like many other women at that age and time, I harbored a swelling anger that I did not know how to express, as if a new organ had grown inside me but had not yet begun to function. 

New lovers are always digging their graves and lying down, smiling, scooping the dirt in with their clean hands. 

I desired her beyond reason, beyond self-protection, beyond common sense, and it is just as difficult to call that love from afar as it is not to call it love when within it. 

Silva

Now it is so clear to me that love is the opposite of deification, that it erodes persona down to its mortal root. She was always human, difficult as it was for me to admit that; I made so much trouble for myself by refusing to see it.

Some days it seems she is only away in the next room, and when go to that room, she has fled to another room, and when I reach that one she is in yet another. So often l am sure I hear her voice on the other side of wall or door, but she never stops moving lecturing, arguing, laughing, making and remaking her case, always insistent, scouring, spiraling, clear. Even now, with all these years gone and all these stories stacked up irrevocably against her, I keep hearing her footsteps come steadily down the stairs, and I swear some afternoons I can hear her taking off her boots at the back door and padding up the hallway after an afternoon hike. In anger, in longing, in both, despite myself, I strain to hear those steps.

Biography of X quotes

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