Charlotte Eriksson > Charlotte's Quotes

“And that's why i have to go back
to so many places
there to find myself
and constantly examine myself
with no witness but the moon
and then whistle with joy,
ambling over rocks and clods of earth,
with no task but to live,
with no family but the road.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Watching the moon
at dawn,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.”
― Izumi Shikibu, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

“(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)
(This is also where my ghosts reside.)
(You have ghosts?)
(Of course I have ghosts.)
(But you are a child.)
(I am not a child.)
(But you have not known love.)
(These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence

“Ghosts can haunt damned near anything. I have heard them in the breathy voice of a song and seen them between the covers of a book. They have hidden in trees so that their faces peer out of the bark, and hovered beneath the silver surface of water. They disguise themselves as cracks in concrete or come calling in a delirium of fever. On summer days they keep pace like the shadow of our shadow. They lurk in the breath of young girls who give us our first kiss. I've seen men who were haunted to the point of madness by things that never were and things that should have been. I've seen ghosts in the lines on a woman's face and heard them in the jangling of keys. The ghosts in fire freeze and the ghosts in ice burn. Some died long ago; some were never born. Some ride the blood in my veins until it reaches my brain. Sometimes I even mistake myself for one. Sometimes I am one.”
― Damien Echols, Life After Death

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.”
― Henry Miller

“I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and create a new world.”
― August Strindberg

“You’re falling now. You’re swimming. This is not
          harmless. You are not
                    breathing.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Hello, darling. Sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud. Especially that, but I should have known. You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life “I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I believe in knowing who you are but without limiting yourself to your own expectation of who you are.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I didn't do music to live; I lived so that I could do music.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I want my life to be the greatest story.
My very existence will be the greatest poem.
Watch me burn.
Love always, Charlotte”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“You are terrifying and strange and beautiful, someone not everyone knows how to love.”
― Warsan Shire

“The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
― Carlos Castaneda

“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”
― May Sarton