When We Were Infinite Quotes

“Because I think then I still thought that the sheer force of caring could somehow be enough--that it would matter, that it would change things, in the end.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“You can't stop someone from making their own choices, you know. It doesn't work that way. And even if it did, it damages you. You can't let yourself keep giving and giving and giving to someone who stopped caring. I've always worried about you making that mistake, but I thought--well, I thought I'd set an example for you. Because if I wanted one thing for you it was that you'd always know how much you're worth. The world will tell you otherwise because you're a girl and you're not white and you're softhearted, but you're allowed to keep things for yourself and to say something isn't good enough for you. You're allowed to want more. You're allowed to be angry.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“In that moment, I saw myself as he saw me, I understood the shape I took in his life: I was, paradoxically, simultaneously too much and not enough. And all my life since then I had tried to rectify that. I had silently taken instructions on how to be better from everywhere I could glean them: when I was freshman and my locker was next to where a group of senior guys would laugh and murmur things about girls walking by (too much makeup; too small an ass; not enough makeup; too loud; kind of a bitch because she'd turned one of them down).”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“Sometimes you can believe in the heart of another person. And sometimes, I think, you can also believe in your own—that it's stronger than you realized, that it can hold multiple things at once, like anxiety and also hope, the future and also the past. It can hold space for another person without forfeiting itself.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“I understood how there are parts of yourself--segments you can measure by time or by depth, by how long or how strongly they were a part of you--that you can't take back once you've offered them to someone who's made it so clear he never wanted them.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything, that I understood then all the shortcomings of remorse and how impotent it is against the past. I like to think I recognized that you don't have to tell yourself things are fine to make it easier on another person, and that you don't have to turn your heart toward men who are suffering when they've brought it on themselves.

But probably that isn't true of me. After all, I would, at that point, have forgiven my own father everything on exchange for something as small as a phone call.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“What would it be like to admit that aloud - that you were angry, that the day had worn on you, to say those things, and to feel them, without worrying how they might look to whoever you were talking to? To let the ugly emotions you harbored, your anger and dissatisfaction and irritation, seep into your words without censoring them.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“It was just that - it felt like it had all been for nothing. I had been terrified, and I had snapped at Brandon and then hung up on him, and I had, in a way, preemptively lived through disaster; I had emotionally gone through it because it had been real to me - and for what?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“I had always hated inserting myself somewhere I wasn't openly wanted.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“If you had to think so hard about whether or not you want to be with someone, what was the point?”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite

“I was not the kind of person people did this sort of thing for. Like elaborate promposals, or surprise birthday parties--I was not first in anyone's life except for my mother's. I was not someone about whom people sent time cataloguing my favorite tea or fruit or crackers, thinking about what sort of gesture might mean something to me.”
― Kelly Loy Gilbert, When We Were Infinite