Kacen Callender > Quotes

“I’m not flaunting anything. I’m just existing. This is me. I can’t hide myself. I can’t disappear. And even if I could, I don’t fucking want to. I have the same right to be here. I have the same right to exist.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“It's easier, sometimes, to love when you know it's a love you can't have.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“It can be easier, sometimes, to choose to love someone you know won't return your feelings. At least you know how that will end. It's easier to accept hurt and pain, sometimes, than love and acceptance. It's the real, loving relationships that can be the scariest.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I mean, I WANT to be in love. That’s something I’ve always wanted to feel. What’s it like, to be in love and have that other person love you, too? Is it another level of friendship? Another level of trust, vulnerability, always telling that person your thoughts and feelings, sharing every little thing with them so that you’re so in sync that it’s like you’re one person? Is it like every time you see them, your heart goes wild, and you can’t think because you’re so effing happy? Is it like whenever they’re away, you feel like you’re missing a piece of yourself? Does knowing someone loves you fill you with confidence, because you know you’re the type of person who deserves love? And what’s it like to break up with someone you love? What’s it like to decide to try again, and let yourself fall in love with someone else? To decide to take that chance you might get hurt, but still want to try? I don’t know. But I want to.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“It's easier to accept hurt and pain, sometimes, than love and acceptance.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“But, just because we loved each other, doesn't mean we were meant to be together.
And just because you loved one, doesn't mean you can't love another.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“Even if a creator made a character to be straight, they put those characters out into the world, right? So those characters are mine now. And I say that Steve and Bucky are gay as hell.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I see at least one thing a day that makes me wonder if the straight people are all right.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“Do you ever feel like you’re only ever watching? I ask Declan. Never really participating. Never really doing. Just always watching.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I look at the moon, and I can’t help but think of everyone else on the planet who’s looking up at it, too, and how alone I am, even though we’re all here on the same Earth. I think about the fact that we should all be connected, but we’re not. We’re too preoccupied trying to hurt each other. It makes me think of how hypocritical I can be, and the mistakes I’ve made, and the ways I’ve hurt people, too.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“No one else gets to define who I am. Only me.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“It could've been easy to say I was hurt because I'm trans, because someone singled me out for my identity, but there's something weird about that - something off, about suggesting that my identity is the thing that brought me any sort of pain. It's the opposite. Being trans brings me love. It brings me happiness. It gives me power.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“It’s almost like I was looking for the pain and the hurt, because it was easier to live with the idea that, even though I want love, I’m not the kind of person who deserves to be loved.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I want to be in love. I’ve never, you know—felt the kind of passion great artists talk about. I want that. I want to feel that level of intensity. Not everyone wants love. I get that, you know? But me—I want to fall in love and be broken up with and get pissed and grieve and fall in love all over again. I’ve never felt any of that. I’ve just been doing the same shit. Nothing new. Nothing exciting.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“What does it feel like, to love someone so much that you’re willing to publicly bare your heart and soul with a black Sharpie?”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“For trans and nonbinary youth: You're beautiful. You're important. You're valid. You're perfect.”
― Kacen Callender⁣, Felix Ever After

“It’s like every identity I have . . . the more different I am from everyone else . . . the less interested people are. The less . . . lovable I feel, I guess. The love interests in books, or in movies or TV shows, are always white, cis, straight, blond hair, blue eyes. Chris Evans, Jennifer Lawrence. It becomes a little hard, I guess, to convince myself I deserve the kind of love you see on movie screens.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I’m realizing it doesn’t really matter if we have a happy ending or not. We’re happy right now. That’s the important part, right?”
― Kheryn Callender, This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story

“The idea of not being alone -- of having someone who sees me, same way I see the things that no one else can see, makes me feel like I'm real. Like I deserve to exist on this planet alongside everyone else. That I get to be here because there's someone else who wants me here too.”
― Kacen Callender, Hurricane Child

“secrets are best kept hidden, because sometimes people aren’t ready to hear the truth. And that’s okay, King, he said, because you don’t need other people to know the truth also. Just as long as you got that truth in you.”
― Kacen Callender, King and the Dragonflies

“It's easier, I think, to love someone you know won't love you - to chase them, knowing they won't feel the same way - than to love someone who might love you back. To risk loving each other and losing it all”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“Just because you don’t understand my identity, doesn’t mean I’m not real. That I don’t exist.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“Yeah. I don’t know, I always feel like I can’t figure out how to just stop watching and actually join.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“I didn't even know so much water could be inside a person- like he was hiding an entire ocean beneath his skin.”
― Kacen Callender, King and the Dragonflies

“What’s it like, to be in love and have that other person love you, too? Is it another level of friendship? Another level of trust, vulnerability, always telling that person your thoughts and feelings, sharing every little thing with them so that you’re so in sync that it’s like you’re one person? Is it like every time you see them, your heart goes wild, and you can’t think because you’re so effing happy? Is it like whenever they’re away, you feel like you’re missing a piece of yourself? Does knowing someone loves you fill you with confidence, because you know you’re the type of person who deserves love?”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“If you feel the need to do it - to write, or paint, or take photos or anything - then that’s what you have to do. That’s the one most important thing you can do. Because if you don’t, then there isn’t any point to anything, right? You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to keep writing.”
― Kheryn Callender, This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story

“When the lights go off in a movie theatre, everyone becomes this one entity: the audience watching the film. And most films aim to get the same emotions out of people. The same reactions. To laugh or be scared or cry or be inspired. The audience goes in as individuals and comes out as people who’ve all experienced the same thing, are all feeling the same way.”
― Kheryn Callender, This Is Kind of an Epic Love Story

“Now that I know he’s Ezra’s new maybe-special friend, I pay a little more attention to him than I would have before. He kind of reminds me of a golden retriever, with his floppy blond hair and blue eyes. The first time I saw him in acrylics class, I kind of immediately hated the guy. He’s the sort of person the world adores, just based on the way he looks, a little like the way people obsess over men like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans and Chris Pine and all the other famous Chrises, plus Ryan Gosling, claiming that they’re liberal and that they aren’t racist and that they’re feminists, but not really thinking about why they’re so obsessed with white men, and why they don’t love any people of color the same way.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“The longer I sit here and sketch, the better my art becomes; and it helps to look at the people around me, instead of seeing who I assume them to be.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After

“You’re not your grades. You’re not your test scores or your college application or even your portfolio.”
― Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After