Kaitlin Shimer > Kaitlin's Quotes

“If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day.”
― Leonard Cohen

“Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“I want to forget everything you told me. I want to wash away how uncertain you made me. How scared I was of losing you. How I lost you anyway. I don’t want to know how your hands feel or what makes you smile. I don’t want to see you in photos, familiar like a dream I had once or a book I never finished.”
― Gaby Dunn

“I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The biggest coward of a man is to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her.”
― Bob Marley

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.”
― Calla Quinn, All the Time

“When I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“I never knew that missin somebody could hurt, I says. But it does. Deep inside. Like it's in my bones. We ain't never bin apart till now. Never. I dunno how to be without him. It's like... I ain't nuthin.”
― Moira Young, Blood Red Road

“We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it”
― Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing

“To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“You can feel the distance. It carries a weight that's heavier than anything.”
― Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

“The stars are brilliant at this time of night
and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break
for darling, the times are quite glorious.

I left him by the water’s edge,
still waving long after the ship was gone
and if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well.
There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew.
I used to go there to say goodbye.
I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them,
one way or the other,
leaving sin on my body
scrubbing tears off with salt
and I built my rituals in farewells.
Endings I still cling to.

So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.

He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head
and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one
for I have used them myself and there is no coming back.
Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.

I turned away from the ocean
as not to fall for its plea
for it used to seduce and consume me
and there was this one night
a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells
and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone.
But I was younger then and easily fooled
and the ocean was deep and dark and blue
and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones.
I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival.

Then days passed by and I spent them with my work
and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send.
But there is this one day every year or so
when the burden gets too heavy
and I collect my belongings I no longer need
and make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anew
and it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written words
and I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone.
Nothing left to hold me back.

You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss
like chains wrapped around my veins,
and if you see a fire from the shore tonight
it’s my chains going up in flames.

The time of moon i quite glorious.
We could have been so glorious.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“I miss her | & not the type of missing when you’re alone, not the type when you’re broken down half drunk, not even the type when you know she’s the one. I’m talking about the kind of missing that when you’re full of happiness…you wish they were there to enjoy it. I don’t care if we’re not together, I don’t care if I never see her again. All that I will every know is I’m here smiling & I know how much she’d like to see that.”
― Brandon Villasenor, I Can't Stop Drinking About You

“You can decorate absence however you want- but your still gonna feel what’s missing.”
― Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference

“Hell is truth seen too late.”
― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“Was it hard?" I ask.
Letting go?"

Not as hard as holding on to something that wasn't real.”
― Lisa Schroeder

“I took a chance, I took a shot
And you may think I’m bullet-proof, but I’m not. You took a swing, I took it hard. And down here from the ground I see who you are”
― taylor swift

“You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.”
― John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

“Sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy

“And I think missing you hurts the most when something funny happens. Because in that one moment I find myself laughing, and within the next second I want to tell or text you what happened. And then it hits me again, every single time, that you aren’t there anymore. That I lost that one thing that mattered to me.”
― Elisabeth Van den Abeele

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If we commit ourselves to one person for life, this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it's a relationship, a business or a hobby.”
― Neil Strauss, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists

“These things...they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth