Kim > Kim's Quotes

“This is what people are like. We are all so fucked up and so magical. Life is so brutal and beautiful. Life is brutiful. For all of us. I remember now. If you want to get jaded and numb, watch the news. If you want to stay human, read letters. When trying to understand humanity, seek out firsthand accounts.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living

“I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just substantial enough to keep us going.”
― Colleen Hoover, Reminders of Him

“Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
― Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss

“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person [whose] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who jump from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view . . . The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump . . . Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.5”
― Emma A. Jane, Diagnosis Normal: Living with abuse, undiagnosed autism, and COVID-grade crazy

“when your mother is your first heartbreak, no love will ever fill the void of feeling so unloved by her.”
― Rose Brik, My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage

“when they say, "but you survived!"
I smile and nod.
I look around and look within,
for any sign of life or remnants of who I had been.
she’s gone (the girl I used to be).
my heart was destroyed, I survived only physically.
I can’t remember a day I haven't cried;
is this what it means to be alive?
they watch me barely holding onto life,
and then they say, "but you survived!”
― Rose Brik, My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage

“if I had only one wish, it would be
that I am worthy enough for my children.
that despite all my mistakes, they will
always feel loved and safe.
they will look back on me fondly,
my memory will be a source of love and peace.
if I had only one wish, it would be
that my children never have to heal from me.”
― Rose Brik, My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage

“when I became a mother, I could no longer turn away from the pain. how could my parents do that to me? how could my mother have thought it was okay? how could my father so easily turn away? I would do anything to protect my child from emotional and physical pain. why didn’t my parents feel the same?”
― Rose Brik, My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage