Kim Culbertson > Quotes

“People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don't think that's true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“Instructions for a Broken Heart
I will find a bare patch of earth, somewhere where the ruins have fallen away, somewhere where I can fit both hands, and I will dig a hole.
And into that hole, I will scream you, I will dump all the shadow places of my heart—the times you didn’t call when you said you’d call, the way you only half listened to my poems, your eyes on people coming through the swinging door of the café—not on me—your ears, not really turned toward me. For all those times I started to tell you about the fight with my dad or when my grandma died, and you said something about your car, something about the math test you flunked, as an answer. I will scream into that hole the silence of dark nights after you’d kissed me, how when I asked if something was wrong—and something was obviously so very wrong—how you said “nothing,” how you didn’t tell me until I had to see it in the dim light of a costume barn—so much wrong. I will scream all of it.
Then I will fill it in with dark earth, leave it here in Italy, so there will be an ocean between the hole and me.
Because then I can bring home a heart full of the light patches. A heart that sees the sunset you saw that night outside of Taco Bell, the way you pointed out that it made the trees seem on fire, a heart that holds the time your little brother fell on his bike at the fairgrounds and you had pockets full of bright colored Band-Aids and you kissed the bare skin of his knees. I will take that home with me. In my heart. I will take home your final Hamlet monologue on the dark stage when you cried closing night and it wasn’t really acting, you cried because you felt the words in you and on that bare stage you felt the way I feel every day of my life, every second, the way the words, the light and dark, the spotlight in your face, made you Hamlet for that brief hiccup of a moment, made you a poet, an artist at your core. I get to take Italy home with me, the Italy that showed me you and the Italy that showed me—me—the Italy that wrote me my very own instructions for a broken heart. And I get to leave the other heart in a hole.
We are over. I know this. But we are not blank. We were a beautiful building made of stone, crumbled now and covered in vines.
But not blank. Not forgotten. We are a history.
We are beauty out of ruins.”
― Kim Culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart

“You should try things on, see if they fit you. If they don't, it's not failure. It's a choice. But always let yourself have a choice, let yourself have possibilities.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“What’s painful is that what you had together, all your inside jokes and favorite restaurants and that movie you both loved but everyone else hated—that’s gone, and there’s no replacement for it, you never replicate it, never get to have it ever again…”
― Kim Culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart

“Homeschool doesn’t give you a get out of teenage jail free card. It just
gives you fewer opportunities to become the butt of someone’s lame Facebook joke.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“That was the great thing about growing up. We got to write our own endings, thousands of them, over and over. That WAS life. It was a million little endings. Even when other people thought we were writing them wrong.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“I don’t think anyone who tries something they love is a failure. I think it’s the people who don’t try who are failures.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“Remember when you were little and you were suposed to love something? No one asked you why. You could just spend hours and hours on it, and nobody worried about whether you were going to turn it into anyting. It didn't have to be about anything...productive. You could just paint or dance, or collect bugs or sea glass and it was just a lovely thing remember?”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“I wanted to say something to him about regret, about how I didn’t really believe in the idea of regret because it was always based on what might have happened. People always held up the now, the concrete now, and compared it to what might have been, and that wasn’t a fair comparison.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“Love is the beauty of this world pressed nose to nose with all its pain.”
― Kim Culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart

“But this wasn't a movie. In life, we didn't get to have credits roll to tell us when we'd come to the end of our epiphany arc. To know when to applaud. In life, there were no credits, no sound tracks. In life, things often didn't work out.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don't think it's true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“Dad always told me I was good at noticing moments, at appreciating the little things in life. It struck me as an odd thing, being good at noticing moments. Moments, in and of themselves, were actually pretty boring little bits of time. For most people, they were like confetti or snowflakes; they didn't amount to much until they were in groups. I think I was the opposite. I avoided the groups, the mounds of confetti or snow that had built up in my life, because I was more frightened of what those mounds might tell me to do.

I lived in the now so I didn't have to move forward.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“But we all want to be together – we want to be a part of something. That in trying to be accepted, wanting to be, I guess, equal to each other – that’s where we fall down, that’s where we end up needing to be saved.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“We're fascinated by things we can't figure out, by the things that don't have a right or wrong answer. Even when we can't explain them, we need to make some sort of sense out of them - create lists, find connections, map it out. Maybe that's why, when we can't seem to figure out all sorts of other more commonplace mysteries (like why we all keep looking at the sky as if it might talk to us), we still need to try.
We think maybe it's a lot like love, that need to make sense of the sky. We don't know why we need it, we can't explain it when it happens or when it doesn't, but we need it like we need air or food.
So we keep looking for it.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“I don't know anything anymore”
― kim culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart

“But that was the thing about metaphors, those tricky comparisons of dissimilar things. They weren't always tricky. Or dissimilar.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

“I stand at a window, looking out at a dark world streaked
with light. And I see what you see,
my eyes filled with a constant threat of tears,
at all the desolate beauty in the world.”
― Kim Culbertson, Instructions for a Broken Heart

“You've got to figure out what makes the world beautiful for you, so you can help make it beautiful for other people.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“People are probably always buried where we're standing.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“Well, we were talking about how stories need to be retold, right? What about love being a risk worth taking even when it makes no sense? I'd like to discuss that story more.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“As pessoas pensam que estar sozinho faz de você um solitário, mas eu não acho que isso seja verdade. Estar rodeado por pessoas erradas é a coisa mais solitária do mundo.”
― Kim Culbertson

“Did it wver throw them off, jumping so quickly between fantasy and reality?”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“You might be an old soul, Carter, but you're still seventeen”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“How did he know my name? My cheeks warmed at the way he said it in his charcoaled British accent. I was such a sucker for it. Too much PBS Masterpiece and Jane Austen movies.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“He's the fire in the woodstove you take totally for granted but, when it goes out, leaves everything cold”
― Kim Culbertson, The Possibility of Now

“She pouted, picking out a licorice bean and tossing it over the side of the house.
‘I would have eaten that,’ Alien Drake told her, staring after it.
‘I know.’ She smiled widely at him.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“Cherk: a charming jerk.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Possibility of Now

“Spontaneous combustion would be easier because it would let me know I blew it... This feels more dangerous, like erosion. And you don't really notice erosion until it's wiped out an embankment or something. And then it's too late.”
― Kim Culbertson, The Possibility of Now

“Adam slipped his glasses off, laying them on the table like an upside down crab.”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star