Empty Roads & Broken Bottles Quotes

“I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it?
I quit, I'm done?
Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment
of what's out there.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“This morning I woke up before the alarm clock went off and the sky outside was a big red ocean. You're beautiful when you're sleeping so I spent an hour observing the way you breathe. Inhale, exhale, without a thought of tomorrow. The window was open and the air was so crisp and I couldn't imagine how to ever ask for more than this.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“You smoked another cigarette and we shared another coffee and it was just another morning that made me realise that this is all it takes to be happy.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I know I'm only 21 and what do I know about life and love and what really matters? But my promise to myself while writing this book was to tell my story, no one else's. To write the story of my life so that I can remember it in the way I want to remember it. To write this down in an attempt to make it better, to make my story come alive.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I don't believe in the hero that sets out to climb a mountain and achieves it with no setbacks. I he does, he obviously didn't set his goals high enough and shouldn't even have anything to be proud of. He didn't challenge himself enough. He might have learned a thing or two, but the real lessons are taught when you're balancing on the very edge, with one foot over the cliff, everyone expecting you to fall. That's when you realise your potential. Or rather, how far away from your own potential you actually 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'm packing my life in a bag again, saying goodbye and writing the last letters. It's been a long journey, back and forth, hide and seek, but this time it's different. This time I am different. I'm not sure where I want to end up but I know how to get there, or at least the first direction, the first turn, the first sunset. I'm longing for peace. I'm longing for borrowed guitars and detachment. Horizons, cheap whiskey straight from the bottle and your hands in mine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“The world is filled with so many beautiful people after all and who am I to think that you will hold on, hold on to me, because who am I and what are we?”
― 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

“I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I’m sorry, but they’ve all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t make it out alive either, so I’m sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I embrace the rain like no one else and I call for storms because I live for the moments when I get through to the other side with all my organs intact.
I change with the seasons and the seasons live in me, depending on the weather as if it's something to be trusted. I don't feel safe unless I'm far below or high above, near the ocean, or climbing the mountain. Where I can't be reached or seen by anyone or anything and not even myself, because it seems to me that these voices in my head get louder just to kill the noise from the outside,
and so I need to go away from time to time.
You will never see me surrender, never see me cry, but you will often see me walk away. Turn around and just leave, without looking back.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Horizons, cheap whisky straight from the bottle
and your hands in mine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I never really found a way to fit in or stand out and I lost myself in the crowd and people’s expectations.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“It's like one of those summer nights with your friends by the ocean. You're drinking straight from the bottle, singing the memories of the best years and for just that night you're infinite. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. There is no future. You have earned the present.
And I'm taking trains to nowhere, hoping to be able to hold on to these few moments on stage every night. And I'm thinking that I'm me,
and this very moment,
I'm actually okay with that.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I know it hurts and I know there are days when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t breathe because of this unbearable lack of something or someone. I know what it’s like to be sad for no reason at all, standing in the rain with no intention of surviving. I know things hurts, I hurt, but life can also be so beautiful… Wonderful things are waiting for you. I know it, I’ve had a taste of it, small moments of complete clarity. Magical nights under the stars and peaceful mornings with someone you love. Before you know it you will thank yourself for staying strong and holding on. I do, most of the days. I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“5.57am and I’m finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn’t get much easier.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“It's like a stomach ache after not eating for five days. The muscles are starting to eat themselves,
and you couldn't care less.
It's about holding on to every moment with every ounce of your being, every atom. It's about memorising every expression, the way your muscles work, the way you speak, how your voice sounds during every part of the day. It's about not feeling the goodbye in every kiss, in every hug, in every touch. It's about trying to keep your voice steady even with a knife to your throat.
It's August and I'm tired of being strong.
I never really was very brave.
Throw me on sharp edges, I've never felt so destructive.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I am the contrast. I am forever the crack in the window that lets the winter in. I am forever the moment between laughter and tears, happiness and sadness. I am light and darkness. I am fire and ice. You will try to take me into your life, but I won't fit, and you will not know how to tell me that there is simply
no place for me.
There is simply no place for a girl like me.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“The heat finally left space for breathing and crisp air. The trees undressed and coloured the streets and I found myself changing with the season. I so badly wanted to be that force of nature, that fire no one can touch, but I was tired. Tired, tired, tired, of being me and if I had one inch of energy to be something beautiful, I would have, but all I could care about was to make it home before it got dark.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Art is supposed to reflect your journey through real life. Your discovery of your character in solitude and around other people, the moments of clarity when you feel loved and the moment when your heart breaks so much that you can hear it crack. When you run careless and free on open fields and when you're struggling on your way home on the bus. This is what makes you a real artist. Experiences, moments, stories. Falling recklessly in love, losing someone you love and then learning to belong to yourself again. Going to new places, meeting new people, driving in the middle of the night on empty streets. Going to the ocean and staying there until 6 a.m, smoking cigarettes and talking about roses and butterflies. These are the things that will give you something worth writing about, worth singing about, worth creating art around.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I spent my youth like this, observing other people. Trying to learn how to live and trying to figure out how to be someone. But I never really found a way to fit in or stand out and I lost myself in the crowd and people's expectations.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“I will never close my eyes again. I don't want to miss a thing. I will never say no.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“We drove to the ocean and smoked cigarettes until six in the morning when I fell asleep on your chest.
When you woke up I was gone and you went back to yours, and I keep having my best conversations while the world is asleep, trying to find myself somewhere between dawn and the sunrise.
Dear universe, may I never find myself.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“Art is supposed to reflect your journey through real life.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps