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

"And maybe life is when you gather all the things you can hold on to and carry with you, and cross your fingers it'll be enough."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"The people who matter to you most - you aren't always going to occupy that same space in their lives, I guess."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"Maybe it takes everything you have, every last atom, to sail past that dark idea, and then on arrival all you have to offer the world is your exhausted, battered self.  But that's everything.  You know?  It's enough."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"At least when you hoard the past for yourself it's still yours.  It's like art, really: you tack it down somewhere flat and static, and then no one can take it away from you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"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."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"It's both the best thing that can happen to you and the most dangerous, because what do you have except the people you belong to and who belong to you?  But then you can also lose yourself to it; you can do things in service of those wes that end up haunting you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I guess I've always believed that's what a relationship is, this space you keep between you where you hold each other's secrets.  Or that it's how you build something together, layering the things you've never told anyone else like bricks."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I'd like to say I lost myself for a moment, and that's why.  But that's the easy way out.  It seems equally possible that in those moments you just let go, when you give in to your impulses, that those are the moments that are most you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I wished my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"It's a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who's supposed to love you doesn't have it in them to be around you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"Because these are the best kind of moments: all of us plotting what we'll eat, that comfort you can slip into with the people who know you best, who love you with a fierceness you'll probably never understand.

I'm lucky.  I've always been."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert