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Jacqueline Simon Gunn Books

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Love's Remains

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Where You'll Land

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Running Backward

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Let Love Rule

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Noah's Story

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Chasing Kat

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Circle of Trust

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Circle of Truth

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Related Quotes

“Don’t blame yourself. You believed what he told you, because you trusted him. You’re a warm, open, trusting person. And you’re trustworthy. Trustworthy people like us always get screwed, because we expect other people to be like us. Don’t let his bad behavior make you question yourself.”

“She averted his eyes, but not before he recognized the pain in them, a tormented and languished gaze, a stare preserved for people who were able to love deeply enough that they could be destroyed by it. For a moment, he knew that gaze intimately, remembering it from a time long gone. The ache of a shattered belief once known. He knew that feeling.”

“Maybe there are some people you can’t unlove no matter how hard you try. Maybe there are some people you stay connected to, because they’ve hurt you to your very core. You keep hoping that somehow the pain can be resolved if they finally do the right thing, but the right thing can never be done because it had to have been done in the past.”

“I hurt myself by hurting you.” His face wore a look of compassion. I hated that look, because it reminded me that he was a good person, that he had tried over and over to apologize. He unwittingly brought out the part of me that I hated, and I projected that hate onto him, because it was easier to hate someone else than to hate myself. Tears poured out of my eyes. And he wrapped his arms around me, holding me as wept. And I hated that his arms still felt good.”

“I needed to walk away. I needed to walked away without trying to fix him or our relationship, but leaving the pieces broken wasn’t easy. It was like leaving shards of the most beautiful glass scattered across your floor, because the pieces were too shattered. And now, you had to step cautiously around the brokenness in order not to slice yourself on the remains.”

“Mistakes we make in the past sometimes keep us connected. Heartache keeps us connected. We want the past to be forgotten, to forget the people we’ve hurt and those who have hurt us and yet, it’s always there, in the periphery of our consciousness, because it has defined part of our life. A part of who we are.”

“She had to be cautious. As much as part of her hated her with every ounce of her flesh, she also loved her. She couldn’t quite reconcile the two, the love with the hate. Instead of feeling like a fluid stream with one on each end, her emotions drifting somewhere in the middle, where love and hate exist simultaneously, she flipped from one dramatic extreme to the other. Sometimes she loved her so much she wanted to devour her, and other times she hated her so much she thought she might kill her.”

“Kiss me hard, let your wetness linger along my lips. I want to drown against you, our bodies woven together and raging in ecstatic synchrony. I don’t want to lie in an easy, hollow embrace. I want to feel the hunger emanating from you. I want the desire to swallow me. I want it to hurt. I want you to show me that this matters. That we matter. That you would risk it all for me. Love me with everything you have or don’t love me at all.”

“Place your truth on my hips. Don’t tell me who you are. Show me with your sincerity, let me see the helplessness in your eyes, wrap your irreverence around me. I’ve been afraid. My freedom has been mistaken for frivolousness, my sexuality for carelessness. Double standards imposed with hypocritical fingers and incurious hearts. I’ve relinquished myself to the wrong ideologies. I’m tired of having to cover my vulnerability to protect others from feeling theirs. Expose me, penetrate me with broad philosophies, let us collide recklessly with freedom. Steal my wild heart, but do not ask me to live under an umbrella when I like being soaked by the rain.”

“I love you. I loved you every day since I first met you. No matter what, that will never change." His admission caught her off-guard. It diffused her rage. She could see the passion, the anguish, the wanting, the love, all of it in his eyes as he said with undeniable vehemence that he would never stop loving her. And as she looked into his eyes, she knew that she would never stop loving him either. And it hurt to love him.”

“Run your fingers across my skin, slowly. Tear down my layers. I want to feel you within. Life is unpredictable. I have been afraid. I have been sad. I have been disappointed. But I don’t want to live behind walls of safety, because I have been hurt. I want to feel your skin against mine and your fingers wandering across me. I want our lives to intertwine dangerously, our essences naked and colliding in reckless passion. I don’t want to exist trapped behind a wall, observing life as an outsider from a window seat. I want you to strip me down layer by layer and hold me from the inside out.”

“Come to me in the dark, bring me all of your scars. I want to know every crack in your heart, every ache, every memory that haunts you. I want to see the realness in your face, the way your eyes stay light even when you talk of pain, and the way your lips are uneven when you smile. The grooves carved into your soul have made you beautiful and I want to run my fingers across the etches. I know people cover wounds and disguise their damage, but this is what makes you, you, and I want to know you. I want to sink inside of you and feel your depth. Don’t protect me from your story. We all have a story and I’m tired of drowning alone.”

“You kept me down so you would feel up, but love isn't a competition. The sun and the moon exist simultaneously in their aloneness, bestowing light, guiding life and time, because they work together. I'm not sure if I'm the sun or if I'm the moon, but I have found a love that embraces the equality of their inseparable connection.”

“The Silence of the Final Goodbye I knew you best from the silences, The time and space in between, The moment before our lips touched, The way your arms went up in the air before you laughed, The smile that we shared before we talked, The redness on your face before your tears, The sensation of your arms around me after you released the embrace. The look you gave me before you walked away, Nothing had ever been so painful, No words could say what your eyes told me, When I wake in the morning without you, It’s the first thing I hear… The silence of the final goodbye.”

“It happens all the time. People lie to themselves or their therapists because they’re ashamed or they don’t want to deal with the reality of their circumstances. Sometimes people are manipulative and twist the narrative to get something from the therapist: attention, empathy, love. Or the most likely reason: Sometimes the truth really hurts.”

“This may sound like a bunch of psychobabble, but the truth is that we are all filled with contradictions; personality is fluid not black and white. And, well…we are all both strong and weak. That’s what it means to be human. We all have flaws, weaknesses. The real strength is when we can admit these to ourselves and become able to show them to others.”

“I’m not extraordinary in any traditional sense. I don’t need to stand out. I’m often overwhelmed by attention. But I will tell you this. I will soar above those walls that you think protect you. I will believe in you as hard as I can and never let go of who I know you can be. I will be vulnerable enough to let the world break me, but strong enough to never wear the armor. I will stand over every line and make you believe you can do the same. It’s an unquietness I feel deep inside. It’s not about being extraordinary, you see. It’s not about standing out. It’s simply about shedding all that’s false. And believing with everything I have that you can too.”

“I’m not the kind of girl who spends hours getting ready. I don’t blow dry my hair. And I hate make up. I’m not pretty. And I don’t want to be. I am passionate and restless and wild. I’m exhausted by prudent ideologies. I’m not inferior because of my lack of convention. I’m as strong as I am broken. I’m tired of having my sexuality mistaken for an invitation. I will sweat and I will run. I will let the rain come down on me. I want to feel life as I am. I don’t want to skate through having my immoderation controlled by weak judgements. By fear. I don’t want to be who I’m supposed to be, I want to be who I am.”

“Between the Miles I have always counted the miles. Sometimes they came quick, Other times slow. The distance between things, The way I could know. Close could feel far, And far could feel near. The miles that passed too quickly, The ones I ran out of fear. They weren’t all the same, So I had been told, The unmarked trails, And the days I was bold. Some miles went down, Spiraling so low, When I was afraid to look forward, There was nowhere to go. The sunset came fast, And the day turned to night, But the trails could be endless, If I looked at them right. Everything I knew, All I was told, The conversations left behind, The people who grew old. When the miles stretched out before me, I wanted to sew them at the seam, Looking forward and then back, Holding everything in between.”

“I wanted to tell you that life is a lot shorter than you could ever have imagined. And those people that love you that you think will be there forever, won’t be. I wanted to tell you not to waste your time pretending to live without really living. Take your shoes off when everyone has theirs on. Wear what you want. Say how you feel. And say it often. Say it when you’re most afraid to. Love so hard that it hurts. Don’t pretend to be someone to make other people comfortable, and don’t let others steal your confidence because they are struggling with their own. I want to hear that you lived your life free of the restrictions that others wanted to choke you with. I want to hear that you had the courage to risk it all, once. That you soaked every last tear out of that heartbreak and are stronger for it. I want to hear that you feel the wind and the rain and the sun. I want to hear you scream so loud that the clouds shake. Because this is all you have. All we have. Right now. I don’t want you to wake up one day and realize that you spent so much time worrying about life that you forgot to live it.”

“She wasn’t broken. She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks. She was always trying to keep herself glued together. But it was hard, she felt too much. No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through, sometimes in drips, other times in floods, She felt everything, the heaviness of the clouds right before rain, the rush of the subway cars as they left the station, the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away, wondering if it was the last time she would see them, the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours. She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky, shedding light on the day, without companion. And she longed to give as much as the sun. If she could brighten someone’s day, bestow warmth were there was cold, make someone smile, give someone hope, then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day, the cracks would fill with love and the pain would become only a voice, reminding her that her pain was important. She knew how fragile life was, how hard, and how precious. She wanted to feel it all.”

“I highly recommend running through grassy trails in the rain. There is a haven of serenity out in nature, the sound of raindrops and the scent of flowers, the feeling of the water along my skin. Even in the middle of a busy city and an insane world, there is beauty everywhere. All we have to do is pause long enough to notice.”

“It’s unfortunate that inflated self-worth is being mistaken for confidence when it’s really an indication of the opposite. True confidence is reflected through humility, vulnerability and kindness. It’s quiet. It’s subtle. It does not overwhelm. It does not shrink others down to elevate oneself and it doesn’t not knock others down to give the illusion of being above.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were being honest with yourself. Because in the past, I have repeatedly compromised what I wanted and twisted what I needed to rationalize staying with someone even when, intuitively, I knew it wasn’t right. It’s self-inflicted gaslighting.”