Quotes from Stephanie Kallos

If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.

Less is less. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I'm sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don't measure these things.

Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edgesof her heart, she was sure of it.

Love? It's when you don't give a thought to all the ifs and want-to's in the world. It's when if all the fires of hell were between you, you'd walk in them gladly to be with him, and sing with joy at your own burnin' if only his kiss was on your mouth.

We're more valuable broken.

She soon learned, though, that giving weight to other people's opinions was creative nihilism; it was like being banished from the Land of No Words and exiled to the Land of All Bullshit.

Sometimes a person can say I'm sorry a thousand times and that glue will never dry.

I'll serve something black. Bean soup, licorice, coffee. It'll be very grim, I promise. We'll cover the mirrors. We'll listen to Piaf. We'll read passages from Dostoyevsky.

Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren't these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?

If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.

He was shorter than an average eight-year-old boy but exceptionally tall for a tulip.

But in dying so suddenly her mother had become a riddle at the gate instead of the road you walked to get there.

Loss is loss. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I'm sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don't measure these things.

T)here were always vacancies in the construct of life: blank spaces occupied by the unseen guest, the absent friend.

It's never too late to try a new approach to learning anything, and just because one has no expectation doesn't mean one has no hope.

The Book put forth the theory that what a person envisions is what a person attracts, so that if you envision loss, despair, loneliness, etc., that is indeed what will befall you. The Book also claimed that all of us lie to ourselves all the time, so why not tell positive lies—known as "affirmations"—instead of negative ones?

It's so hard to explain what the dead really want. Not to be alive again, heavens no, never that: a passenger buckled into that depreciating vehicle of the body, that cramped one-seater with its structural flaws and piss-poor mileage, its failures and betrayals, its worn, nonfunctioning, irreplaceable parts.

extras, in case you want to send some." "Irma," M.J. said. "Who am I going to write a postcard to? You're the

At what point will elegant linguistic languor be permanently usurped by text-speak expediency? When will we humans abandon the ability to generate long, complex, lusciously worded emotional expressions—like Elizabethan sonnets!

Her eyes are the first indication of her infirmity, or rather that she resides in more than one world. (Dementia)

The next time you break something, consider the action that might not immediately come to mind: Say a prayer of thanks over what has been broken. Then, give it a place of honor. Build it a shrine.

Maybe we feel such a strong kinship with pique assiette because it is the visual metaphor that best describes us; after all, we spend much of our lives hurling bits of the figurative and literal past into the world's landfill—and then regret it. We build our identities from that detritus of regret. Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren't these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?