Things I Learned in the Night Quotes

“His arms surround me like a nice, yellow house. A warm house, a safe house, probably in the suburbs with a white picket fence. But your arms; they were a home. A home with an old soul (maybe a lake house in the fall) with a wood stove and kitchenette and a murphy bed imprinted with bodies shaped like ours. Granted, there were a few leaks here and there, and the wind got in at night, but I don’t remember ever feeling cold. My head wants the house, but no matter how I try, my heart just wants to go home. The heart wants what it wants”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I have a whole world tucked away in my closet; sepia colored memories of my parents in the eighties, ticket stubs from movies I don’t remember because I was too busy exploring the mouth of a boy I do, and crinkled petals from a golden sunflower that said you still love me. And though you haven’t come back yet, I know you will, because sunflowers never lie. Sunflowers Never Lie”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I grow wildflowers from my back like a fertile garden and you pick them one by one until I am all bare roots and broken stems. You pluck the petals- She loves me, she loves me not but that’s the problem, see; I’m kneeling at your feet, offering you the skin off my back and still you need an old wives’ tale to prove that it’s enough.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“If you are looking for a sign to stay, here is your sign.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“karma isn’t magic, it’s the action of reaping what you sow.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“She’s just a friend you said so I invited her in and offered her my coffee, my friendship, and my couch but then she took you right out from under me and now she lives in the house I used to call home and sleeps with the man I used to call my own like a cuckoo who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and watches as it single-handedly destroys a family and justifies it with instinct. Cuckoo Bird”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I do not want to give you up just because summer is coming to an end.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“You and I were sinew connected like muscle to bone.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“Humbly, like the tides that shape the earth but do not announce their changing; that’s how we should live. Humility”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“This is how it was for us, before tech came along before, when we knew better where we belonged I belong to the forest,  I belong to the trees; I’m at home in the mud, in the grass, with the bees.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“It could be worse doesn’t make it feel any better now, does it? Unhelpful Help”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“(There’s a reason you’re here. There is meaning in your journey. There is recovery. There are better brain days. There are fewer tears. There are smiles that aren’t so forced. There is happiness. Believe that.)”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“They say it doesn’t matter whether it was real to them if it was real to you as if I’m a child with an imaginary friend and I’m supposed to feel good about creating a narrative no one else wanted a part in at twenty-three years old. More Unhelpful Help”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I want to lay in the freshly mowed grass and be young again. I want to take off my shoes and stain my clothes green and eat dinner without washing my hands. I want to go to bed with pollen in my hair and the windows open and the sound of rain. I want to wake up eight or ten or twelve again. But when I wake it’s not right. This isn’t my mother’s house, and nobody is here to clean up my messes. I miss you, I miss you. I miss the way the sky looked before I grew tall and the sound of my voice before it grew tired. Take me back, just take me back.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“Clocks and calendars are for fools
who think they have any control,
so I just let time slip by
and pretend everything was “just yesterday” so I don’t feel like I’m speeding
toward the finish line, because who the hell knows where the finish line is, anyway.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“It’s funny how boring normalcy seems until it is ripped away.

- Things we take for granted”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I guess this is what the end feels like; like pretending we’re enjoying the rain, when really we’re just hoping it fills the silence so we don’t have to.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“If the river drowned you,
would you say it was out of love?
Was Vesuvius romantic
just because two lovers died in each other’s arms, preserved in ash for all time?

The answer to those questions is no,
so why do we keep using love to justify pain?”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I watched her drop a mug, pick up each piece
and glue it back together like it was the holy grail.

I fell in love that day,
not because she was clumsy or cute, but because she still saw value
in something so broken.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night

“I once read something that went like this: “If you are looking for a sign to stay, here is your sign.” So I am just reiterating these words in case you haven’t heard them before: Stay ​ Stay ​ Stay ​ STAY. (There’s a reason you’re here. There is meaning in your journey. There is recovery. There are better brain days.”
― Emily Byrnes, Things I Learned in the Night