Picture Us in the Light Quotes

“Other people don't exist just to be your happy ending, you know?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“It's hard not to lose your foothold when someone peers inside you, sees all those things you tried the hardest to keep hidden, all those ugly shames you've tried to tell yourself aren't really as bad as they seem. All those lies disintegrate in the light.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“It’s a strange and uniquely painful thing when you try to reach someone and instead you pass right through them, like a ghost; it makes you feel not all the way there yourself.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“All my life, I've always waited for signs. Like with art, like with everything. I've waited for things to fall into place and to feel right, to feel like the universe had given me its permission and its blessing.
But maybe you never really get that, or maybe only some of us do, if we're lucky, if we're born to the right people in the right circumstances at the right time, and even then, maybe not. And the rest of us--the world will tell you over and over you aren't good enough, in as many ways as it knows how. Maybe you have to fight for your place in it no matter what, no matter who you are.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“From watching my parents I think being married or being with someone else in any kind of real way takes a certain amount of bravery, and it's not something I'm positive I have in me. To pluck your heart from your chest that way and hand it to someone, unprotected, and wait to see how gently they'll stitch it back in for you, or not--to wake up all those days you're the crappiest version of yourself and face the person who knows you best, morning after morning, year after year.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Art doesn't change the ending. It doesn't let you lose yourself that way--the opposite, really; it calls you from the darkness, into the glaring, unforgiving light. But at least--this is why it will always feel like a calling to me--it lets you not be so alone.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Because if you're tangled up in someone else, if your futures are tied that way, if that's real and if you know when it happens - then it means you know who you belong to, and you know whose fates are tied to yours, whether you like it or planned it or not, whether they still exist in the same world with you or they don't, and I think that's where everything begins and ends. I think that's everything.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“We all have those things, I think – those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone'll swoop in and tell us we're just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don't care that much about.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“If nothing else there's a comfort in knowing someone's holding space in their own life for what's hurting you. That's the thing that makes life bearable sometimes, I think: that you can feel more than one thing at a time, that it floods into you from so many directions at once.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“But when I really think about it, I wonder if maybe it's more than that; maybe it's something that hits close to the deepest core of who I am. I'm not a religious person, but what I have with Harry is the closest thing I have - when I am with him is when the world is at its clearest for me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“She's who he imagines calling first when he gets his letter from Princeton, the audience he pictures when he's collecting all the important and also the stupid insignificant parts of his day to give to someone? When he imagines disasters happening, cancer or nuclear fallout or the Big One we're supposed to get in California, at night when it's quiet and he feels all the weight of his own life pressing in on him, she's the lurch in his stomach and the hand he gropes around for in the dark?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Something crackles on my skin like a fire. He felt me in that moment, he understood what it was to me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“I couldn't bring myself to sing anything during worship and I was still furious at everyone who ever tried to tell me last year God works all things for good, but then during the message I just felt like God was reminding me that the whole history of the world is that it's fallen. He promises redemption someday, just not yet. And in the meantime whole decades' worth of the Bible is just grieving all these broken things.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“And I believed him. It was genuine, that confusion, and that was the first time I really saw him, I think- when I understood that his social persona was concealing none of what I'd always thought it was, but actual kindness instead, that there was a kind streak at his core.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“There are people so enshrined in your past they'll never stop mattering to you.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“someone's opinion of you isn't the kind of thing you can exactly confront someone over or defend yourself against, especially when that would mean bringing too many things you'd rather keep hidden out into open; it's just that every time from then on when you see them you that they think you have no principles, which, cool.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“or maybe we all just forgive the people we love, because we love them, and for no other reason than that.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“We all have those things, i think--those things we want too badly to speak about aloud for fear someone'll swoop in and tell us we're just dreaming, those things we hold close and fantasize about at night and swear to the world we don't care that much about”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Perhaps, holding you there in her arms, amazed at the heft of you, the fact of you, your mother can fool herself into believing she’ll hold on to you like this all your life.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“It's funny about being in a car with someone – all those miles you plow into the road tie you to each other somehow, intertwine your fates at least temporarily, and they blur the borders between your two existences and etch away at whatever was keeping you so separate and distinct.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“I know him well enough to know he’s still down about his test, though.
I’ve never brought up the thing that I always felt like, underneath
everything, knitted us together early on: that the truth about Harry is that
he’s always felt like he has to distract the world from noticing he doesn’t
measure up, that deep down he believes that if you take away the GPA and
the test scores and everything he put on his college apps, there’s nothing
left.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“You can’t mount a solid argument against someone who’d just as soon burn down the things you love, shrugging as they pour the gasoline.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“To pluck your heart from your chest that way and hand it to someone, unprotected, and wait to see how gently they'll stitch it back in for you.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“as far as sandra was concerned I was someone else completely, and id always resented her for it. i told myself that, anyway, because it let me off the hook. but maybe it was always more that I couldn't ever quite face her. maybe it was just that she was a witness to a part of myself i'd rather bury. that's probably why I let things stay that way--i was always afraid she'd expose me, even if just to myself.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“i wishes my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“i know him well enough to know he's still down about his test, though. I've never brought up the thing that I always felt like, underneath everything, knitted us together early on: that the truth about harry is that he's always felt like he has to distract the world from noticing he doesn't measure up, that deep down he believes that if you take away the GPA and the test scores and everything he put on his college apps, there's nothing left.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light

“Dreaming about something all your life doesn't mean it's yours.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, Picture Us in the Light