The Goodbye Song Quotes

“And we'll act like some people mean nothing to us, but we don't live very long. When you get older, you'll see: a week with someone is enough to cry about for a lifetime.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“With movement comes identity.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“If I told you the few things keeping me alive,
Don’t run, don’t laugh, don’t cry.
Just forgive me for being soft in life,
I am one of those things that die”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“I’m no tattoo artist, but I do have a knife.
And I’ll cut to the chase and say I use it every night. The first letter of your name
Starts with an “L”
So I keep drawing them lowercase
All over my shell.
People ask why I cut myself,
I say, “I’m just writing.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Death is the ultimate vacation: you’re with the stars, you don’t have to pay rent, everyone loves you, and nothing hurts. So, it’s very important you save death for later.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Is there not genius in the villain? In the criminal? A magic born in the beginnings of the tiniest of rebellions? When I think of someone who has to create a masterplan to rob a store, the valor of a pirate, or a malicious CEO trying to tear down competition, at least they have a point of view. They are uninhibited by the parameters of previous motion. They are electric imaginers. And they make their money by thinking. The originality of a criminal’s thoughts requires a freedom so rare to attain—and from there, brilliant masterplans, blueprints, trajectories, and other devices are employed. No one owns them and they defy odds with every offense. To have the mind of a criminal, but the heart of an angel would be ideal, but who promised ideal? It’s too bad the cleverest of things were corrupt and have made us call geniuses stupid. Maybe it’s circumstance, maybe it’s hereditary, but the greatest criminals have the creativity and courage like no other.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“The second I get into a car and we start driving, I imagine a fatal crash to the last detail. When I’m in the liquor store, I imagine a robbery by the time the cashier tells me the total. Every plane ride is an 8-hour movie in my head of me planning what I would say to the stranger on my right if the pilot announced the plane was crashing. I always imagine these scenarios. Family dying. Earthquakes. The earth suddenly falling because gravity left the party. It’s exhausting. Yesterday someone was afraid of me. I was bicycling with Austin and we saw a dead deer on the road. It was so large. Austin nearly fell off his bike when he saw it. Then he looked over at me confused. He asked why I didn't react to it. I told him it was because I’d already imagined one six miles back. There are always two worlds playing in my head at once: what’s in front of me and what could be.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“People are born on this planet with no choice at all
And have to spend most of their life working to pay it off.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“What I keep thinking about is that... it’s a long time ahead of me without her. My whole 20s. And 30s. And the rest of my life. How am I supposed to do all that? It was so early.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Do you have an opinion or did you just become everyone else?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“My greatest fear is that she'll look at me sad and say, "If you fought one day more, I'd have said yes.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“A cell.

An accident.

A person who would’ve been miserable anyway.
An appointment.

A religious order.

An expense.

A political debate.

Anything but a soul. “Why?”

I don’t care who fights for my life.

I care that they do.
They aren’t sure

When my life starts,

But they tell me when it ends.

My body, my rights.

Somebody, where’s mine?

I wasn’t going to come out

As a different thing.

So why am I treated

Like a different thing?

They knew what I’d be,”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Meet your partner. You think you’ve never seen them before, but you knew them. They were in your first breakup, your worst heartbreak, your old marriage, the honeymoon sex, in the alcohol swishes of finding out your spouse cheated, and in the times she leaned over the grass to kiss your cheek at picnics. Love was dancing in the same candidate who kissed you, the same nominee who hated you, and the plenty of people who tricked you. Love was dancing to the tango of your agreement to try. Love grows bigger and bigger, shaping itself more correctly to your happy heart.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Because I have nobody and nowhere to go, I’m forced to think of everyone everywhere I am.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“I am grateful that you, journal, can look at me without closing your covers. Sometimes, that’s all I do: open and close you, open and close, all afternoon on my bed, expecting you to shut on me, but you never do.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“One day, she told me her favorite color was green. Do you know how much green I see in a day? Enough to remember any other color ain’t her favorite. Green. That’s a whole lifetime with a girl whose face emerges on leaves, tennis courts, the billboard on every nearest passion pit, the emerald fabric of my curtains, hotel salads, on a crumpled Washington, and the two forest eyes of my own that look back at me in the mirror and say, “Diana #1, Diana #2.” Ain’t that a bite. One day, I will lay outside to daydream about her for so long, fungi will grow on my pathetic body, plaguing me with her favorite color. Will she love my algae then?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Some people only needed you for transactions. Don’t let sweet personalities fool you into thinking they’ll hold your hand if it’s got blood on it. If one day, you lost a leg, your boss wouldn’t close the store branch for you. If you lost a home, your old classmates wouldn’t lend you theirs. If you decided to give up, your circle will say you made the right decision. No one’s going to save you, but they love meeting you. And so suddenly, when you lose, the whole world turns on you. A freak— as if alienation was only one amputation, one home, one failure away.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“You claim to want love, but how can that be if you have not yet met the person you love? Rather, you desire its advantages: touch, security, and company. Love is born from another person—their touch, their company, their ideas. Love is a hand that knocks on our doors and owns no door of its own for you to knock on. When dealing with people, we are each too unique and changing to be labeled and be fitted to another person’s prerequisite needs. And so, it is our lovers who introduce us to our desire. Until then, it is not love that we want. If we claim, alone in our homes, to so badly want love, or marriage, we likely want that other thing.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“What's your type?' she asked.

'Well, the right person wouldn't need to know.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“I am off to a life where I can exist in a room and not have to pretend I want to be there. I am off to hear people who have something to say. I don’t even have to agree with it— I just want to know what it’s like to listen to a real sentence. I long for a time where I don’t wish the day would be over. This means leaving the company. I can wonder, or I can wander—and it’s time for me to get lost. Reinvention is hard. To let it go? To admit you don’t love something anymore? That’s the stuff that kills you. But I must run before another workday asks for me again. Things are hard so that we can start. I feel like fate is blindfolding me. My arms reach out not knowing if I’ll impale myself or secure my foothold—but all great things come from motion. Nothing begets nothing. And I’m scared, but I have the movies with me. The things we love require us. I wonder what would happen if everyone in the world did what they loved. Would things fall into place and leave no empty spaces? Would there be harmony in the work field? Sustainable marriages? Children with parents? Dirty water? Would there be resignation letters?”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“You think I got over you? I just got older.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Toulouse is to lose.
Good on us,

That one never lied
And said it’s still alive.
A full life is a series
Of incompletions.
Whole with holes.
Entirely fragmented.
Carrying one-days,
Sentences,
Old lovers,
And looks.
Absolutes turn men and women

Into machines that need

Numbers to work.

But people were never meant to work
Just to live.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“In 1961, a recovering addict was saved by the works of an uplifting novelist. Months later, the man found out his role model committed suicide one morning. Liar, he cried. It was like watching his hero say that heroes don’t exist and then flying away. What do books mean if the writer gave up? The reader decided to give heroism a try and wrote stories about how great life can be until he could convince himself of it. The experiment is still in the works.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“She wrote short stories because she said no to parties.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Don’t tell the wealthy that the nightly humming they hear in order to sleep is made possible from the distant wheels of a midnight cart being rolled by a man who dreams of a bed.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“We use our eyes to see, but we use our voice to know.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Parliament will also struggle with Shakespeare. Rappers stutter too when they flirt. The palms of poised politicians sweat. Police officers fart. Princesses get wedgies. Royal Guards had to keep from laughing. The last rep in the gym will make any arm shake. Presidents had to apply. Rome fell.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There are no rules. Everything in your radius was made from hesitant decisions by hesitant men. It was all a gamble and it only appears absolute. But anything that exists is proof that it can change.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Sometimes I’ll be in my room and recall a terrible memory. I’ll laugh ridiculously into my bed or when I remember an embarrassing moment, I’ll curl up, crinkling myself with blankets I wish could swallow me away into another world. I probably look crazy—some girl reacting to her own head, so I make sure to say what I’m thinking out loud in order for the ghosts to understand. They may have seen a lot, but they’re not mind readers and may appreciate a backstory or two.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“There’s so much to understand about a good collarbone.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song