Stephanie Kallos > Quotes

“Less is less. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I'm sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don't measure these things.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edgesof her heart, she was sure of it.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Love? It's when you don't give a thought to all the ifs and want-to's in the world. It's when if all the fires of hell were between you, you'd walk in them gladly to be with him, and sing with joy at your own burnin' if only his kiss was on your mouth.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“We're more valuable broken.”
― Stephanie Kallos

“Sometimes a person can say I’m sorry a thousand times and that glue will never dry.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“If someone were to autopsy her heart, they'd find traces of life, evidence of eons gone by. Times when she'd been able to feel and the feelings left imprints. Maybe her heart was wearing a cast. Maybe it wasn't sclerosed at all but atrophied, shrunken, and the cast enclosing it was scribbled over with stories written in a dead language. Was there any softness left in there? Any spot that was still unfired, unformed, unglazed? Was there access? Entry? A place still open to impression? No. Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edges of her heart, she was sure of it.”
― Stephanie Kallos

“I'll serve something black. Bean soup, licorice, coffee. It'll be very grim, I promise. We'll cover the mirrors. We'll listen to Piaf. We'll read passages from Dostoyevsky.”
― Stephanie Kallos

“Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren’t these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Look now. Look at what you value, what you hold dear. Objects, first. And not necessarily because of their innate value (although that might figure into it), but because they are endowed - by your mind and imagination, by your memories - with what is know as "sentimental value."

Sentiment has been defined as ascribing a value to something above and beyond what its value is to God. This presumes a belief in God, and furthermore a belief in a kind of God that passes judgment on the inexplicable fondness of the human heart; there is an expression, isn't there: "the object of my affections." But perhaps you do not believe in that kid of God, or any other, for that matter.

Look then at the faces and bodies of people you love. The explicit beauty that comes not from smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience that has left its mark. Each face, each body is its own lving fossilized record. A record of cats, combatants, difficult births; of accidents, cruelties, blessings. Reminders of folly, greed, indiscretion, impatience. A moment of time, of memory, preserved, internalized, and enshrined within and upon the body. You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful. If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.”
― Stephanie Kallos

“He was shorter than an average eight-year-old boy but exceptionally tall for a tulip.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“But in dying so suddenly her mother had become a riddle at the gate instead of the road you walked to get there.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Memory—uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable—is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we’re inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can’t be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Only by looking backward are we able answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive?”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“It's never too late to try a new approach to learning anything, and just because one has no expectation doesn't mean one has no hope.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“(T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“The Book put forth the theory that what a person envisions is what a person attracts, so that if you envision loss, despair, loneliness, etc., that is indeed what will befall you. The Book also claimed that all of us lie to ourselves all the time, so why not tell positive lies—known as “affirmations”—instead of negative ones?”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Loss is loss. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I’m sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don’t measure these things.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“At what point will elegant linguistic languor be permanently usurped by text-speak expediency? When will we humans abandon the ability to generate long, complex, lusciously worded emotional expressions—like Elizabethan sonnets!”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“The broken are not always gathered together, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of “senseless tragedies,” but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them—clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; over roads new-printed with their footsteps, the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities peopled with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stubbornness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“The next time you break something, consider the action that might not immediately come to mind: Say a prayer of thanks over what has been broken. Then, give it a place of honor. Build it a shrine.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“extras, in case you want to send some.” “Irma,” M.J. said. “Who am I going to write a postcard to? You’re the”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Maybe we feel such a strong kinship with pique assiette because it is the visual metaphor that best describes us; after all, we spend much of our lives hurling bits of the figurative and literal past into the world’s landfill—and then regret it. We build our identities from that detritus of regret. Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren’t these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“Her eyes are the first indication of her infirmity, or rather that she resides in more than one world. (Dementia)”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts

“It’s so hard to explain what the dead really want. Not to be alive again, heavens no, never that: a passenger buckled into that depreciating vehicle of the body, that cramped one-seater with its structural flaws and piss-poor mileage, its failures and betrayals, its worn, nonfunctioning, irreplaceable parts.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Sing Them Home

“There can be a kind of tipping point when it comes to the souls' yearnings, a moment when it it no longer possible to keep waiting for fate or coincidence or design... It might be reunion, with others, with self. It might be some small cherished ritual, forgotten, denied. At such times, when the soul wearies of waiting, she throws an image of the longed-for experience out ahead of her: an avatar, a hologram, a dream. She engineers, if you will, an answer to her prayer. She projects her yearning onto a stage and then -- with a heart full of faith, expectation and courage -- rushes into it.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Language Arts