Kelly Loy Gilbert > Quotes

“Other people don't exist just to be your happy ending, you know?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“It's hard not to lose your foothold when someone peers inside you, sees all those things you tried the hardest to keep hidden, all those ugly shames you've tried to tell yourself aren't really as bad as they seem. All those lies disintegrate in the light.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“It’s a strange and uniquely painful thing when you try to reach someone and instead you pass right through them, like a ghost; it makes you feel not all the way there yourself.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“All my life, I've always waited for signs. Like with art, like with everything. I've waited for things to fall into place and to feel right, to feel like the universe had given me its permission and its blessing.
But maybe you never really get that, or maybe only some of us do, if we're lucky, if we're born to the right people in the right circumstances at the right time, and even then, maybe not. And the rest of us--the world will tell you over and over you aren't good enough, in as many ways as it knows how. Maybe you have to fight for your place in it no matter what, no matter who you are.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“From watching my parents I think being married or being with someone else in any kind of real way takes a certain amount of bravery, and it's not something I'm positive I have in me. To pluck your heart from your chest that way and hand it to someone, unprotected, and wait to see how gently they'll stitch it back in for you, or not--to wake up all those days you're the crappiest version of yourself and face the person who knows you best, morning after morning, year after year.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Art doesn't change the ending. It doesn't let you lose yourself that way--the opposite, really; it calls you from the darkness, into the glaring, unforgiving light. But at least--this is why it will always feel like a calling to me--it lets you not be so alone.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Because if you're tangled up in someone else, if your futures are tied that way, if that's real and if you know when it happens - then it means you know who you belong to, and you know whose fates are tied to yours, whether you like it or planned it or not, whether they still exist in the same world with you or they don't, and I think that's where everything begins and ends. I think that's everything.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“We all have those things, I think – those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone'll swoop in and tell us we're just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don't care that much about.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“If nothing else there's a comfort in knowing someone's holding space in their own life for what's hurting you. That's the thing that makes life bearable sometimes, I think: that you can feel more than one thing at a time, that it floods into you from so many directions at once.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“But when I really think about it, I wonder if maybe it's more than that; maybe it's something that hits close to the deepest core of who I am. I'm not a religious person, but what I have with Harry is the closest thing I have - when I am with him is when the world is at its clearest for me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“You can't stop someone from making their own choices, you know. It doesn't work that way. And even if it did, it damages you. You can't let yourself keep giving and giving and giving to someone who stopped caring. I've always worried about you making that mistake, but I thought--well, I thought I'd set an example for you. Because if I wanted one thing for you it was that you'd always know how much you're worth. The world will tell you otherwise because you're a girl and you're not white and you're softhearted, but you're allowed to keep things for yourself and to say something isn't good enough for you. You're allowed to want more. You're allowed to be angry.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“Because I think then I still thought that the sheer force of caring could somehow be enough--that it would matter, that it would change things, in the end.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“There's a place in your mind where any voices you let in slip down your spine and into your lungs and heart, become a thing you breathe and bleed.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“And the way she smiles at me suspends the rest of the world all around me, makes me feel like I've borrowed another life.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“She's who he imagines calling first when he gets his letter from Princeton, the audience he pictures when he's collecting all the important and also the stupid insignificant parts of his day to give to someone? When he imagines disasters happening, cancer or nuclear fallout or the Big One we're supposed to get in California, at night when it's quiet and he feels all the weight of his own life pressing in on him, she's the lurch in his stomach and the hand he gropes around for in the dark?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“I think the way you know you love someone is how badly you take it when they're suffering.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“Sometimes, in a crowd, that's when you're the most alone.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“I couldn't bring myself to sing anything during worship and I was still furious at everyone who ever tried to tell me last year God works all things for good, but then during the message I just felt like God was reminding me that the whole history of the world is that it's fallen. He promises redemption someday, just not yet. And in the meantime whole decades' worth of the Bible is just grieving all these broken things.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“In that moment, I saw myself as he saw me, I understood the shape I took in his life: I was, paradoxically, simultaneously too much and not enough. And all my life since then I had tried to rectify that. I had silently taken instructions on how to be better from everywhere I could glean them: when I was freshman and my locker was next to where a group of senior guys would laugh and murmur things about girls walking by (too much makeup; too small an ass; not enough makeup; too loud; kind of a bitch because she'd turned one of them down).”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“Something crackles on my skin like a fire. He felt me in that moment, he understood what it was to me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“The thing about prayer is it always feels like an act of faith - it forms some fragile new chamber in your heart, something empty and vulnerable that bleeds loneliness if God never answers you.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“I understood how there are parts of yourself--segments you can measure by time or by depth, by how long or how strongly they were a part of you--that you can't take back once you've offered them to someone who's made it so clear he never wanted them.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think- when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I'd always thought it was, but actual kindness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“There are a million ways you're wrecked by the absence of someone who belongs there with you.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“This is why I hate when people tell me I don't know how you're surviving - because it implies you get a choice. What do they think, you're actually going to die? Because that's not how it works. You don't get an escape into nothing.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Conviction

“Sometimes you can believe in the heart of another person. And sometimes, I think, you can also believe in your own—that it's stronger than you realized, that it can hold multiple things at once, like anxiety and also hope, the future and also the past. It can hold space for another person without forfeiting itself.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“It was just that - it felt like it had all been for nothing. I had been terrified, and I had snapped at Brandon and then hung up on him, and I had, in a way, preemptively lived through disaster; I had emotionally gone through it because it had been real to me - and for what?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“We all have those things, i think--those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone'll swoop in and tell us we're just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don't care that much about”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“I was not the kind of person people did this sort of thing for. Like elaborate promposals, or surprise birthday parties--I was not first in anyone's life except for my mother's. I was not someone about whom people sent time cataloguing my favorite tea or fruit or crackers, thinking about what sort of gesture might mean something to me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything, that I understood then all the shortcomings of remorse and how impotent it is against the past. I like to think I recognized that you don't have to tell yourself things are fine to make it easier on another person, and that you don't have to turn your heart toward men who are suffering when they've brought it on themselves.

But probably that isn't true of me. After all, I would, at that point, have forgiven my own father everything on exchange for something as small as a phone call.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite