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Famous Karl Kristian Flores Quotes

“Withhold your trust from the critics, the scholars, the writers, the award-winners, the showrunners, because they will write about crime and decorate their art with crime, and it will bring you to tears, but identification of a burning building does not extinguish a fire. Knowing what is right doesn’t make us right. It makes us responsible.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“Life often functions in dull repetition, but humanity does not operate in patterns. Experiences are random to the point of them never happening again. People are different and they shift throughout space over time. Nothing may repeat. There is no one in a million. There is one in one. It was why no summer was the same. It was why some lips in history never got to test if they were good kissers. It was why Ali lost to Frazier but Frazier lost to Foreman. It is why film does not get another Marlon Brando and no music, however similar, can be compared to Debussy. To resurrect these greats is like trying to re-enter a lost dream. The shore motions toward the feet and never meets them exactly again.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Every artist loved their art for the same reason, and this caused no suspicion to the world. They regularly say: 'My field captures the human experience.' 'And what is the human experience to you exactly?' questions O’Hare. 'I want to be a storyteller who inspires and expresses their imagination.' 'But how does your chosen art differ from other mediums?' questions O’Hare. 'I am a quiet observer who innately loves philosophy.' But here you are screaming this in a room, cries Dr. O’Hare. 'I am beyond grateful for the people I’ve worked with who made this the greatest collaboration I could have ever asked for.' 'But how did you collaborate—with thought and rehearsal?—or did you just perform some damn thing and sign both your names on it?' asked O’Hare.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“He frowned with difficulty at everyone’s quick transition. He felt something crack in the room. It was like the feeling an artist got when he closed up his gallery, walked upstairs to his living quarters, and stared at the window to watch his former crowd rush to party next door and forget his exhibition one martini at a time. It was like goodbye. There was an unsaid, incomprehensive quality of unfairness to endings. They lacked a transition. The guitarist’s identity, for example, was in her strumming ten seconds ago, not when she finished and looked up at the seduced crowd as “her” again. The singer’s heart was housed in his lyrics, not in his thick-accented voice that rooms never understood.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“He did not want to write a book about it. He’d tried once, attempting a novel, even some poems, but they broke his heart and he could not bring himself to art anymore. 'So the only way to end this painful curiosity is to transfer it to someone else? To fictionalize it? To talk about it and still live the same problem tomorrow? To appear as if you’ve beaten it just because you can identify the problem?' He would sob in museums, where he sought refuge but escaped in horror. 'Fuck that—art’s not an answer to life, it’s a disguise.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Andrei avoided the internet as well and this evasion only added to his gloom. He loved music, especially old songs, and he loved movies, of all sorts. If he had the patience, sometimes he would read. While most of the pages he turned bored him to sleep, certain books with certain lines disarranged him. Some literature brought him to his feet, laughing and howling in his room. When the book was right, it was bliss and he wept. His room hushed with serenity and indebtedness. When he turned to his computer, however, or took out his phone, he would inevitably come across a viral trend or video that took the art he loved and turned it into a joke. The internet, in Andrei’s desperate eyes, managed to make fun of everything serious. And if one did not laugh, they were not intelligent. The internet could not be slowed and no protest to criticize its exploitation of art could be made because recreations of art hid perfectly under the veneer of mockery and was thus, impenetrable. It was easy to use Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2’ for a quick laugh, to reduce the ‘Funeral March’ to background music. It was a sneaky way for a digital creator to be considered an artist—and parodying the classics made them appear cleverer than the original artist. Meanwhile, Andrei’s body had healed playing Chopin alone in his apartment. He would frailly replay movie moments, too, that he later found the world edited and ripped apart with its cheap teeth. And everyone ate the internet’s crumbs. This cruel derision was impossible to escape. But enough jokes, memes, and glam over someone’s precious source of life would eventually make a sensitive body numb. And Andrei was afraid of that. He needed his fountain of hope unblemished. For this reason, he escaped the internet’s claws and only surrendered to it for e-mails, navigation, and the weather.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“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.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“A post-movie dance: [You walk out of the theatre. You stretch. You toss your popcorn in the trash bin and wonder if it’s recycling. You pretend to be a slow walker on your way to the exit so you don’t appear too close to the stranger in front of you. You walk to the bathroom. You wait in line. You piss. You hold your fart. You come out. You walk to the parking garage. You walk back to the theatre because you forgot to validate your ticket. You come back to your car. You leave the garage. You get a phone call from mom and talk to her. Then you turn on the radio in traffic. Then you come home and respond to e-mails and go back to sleep. And soon, a movie has died.]”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“It is to change a life. That’s why you do it. An enormous urge for change is the only reason to suffer. They can call your mission cliché, but someone needs to be hideous, otherwise we’ll all believe we’re perfect. It’s important that your work is important. There’s not enough time for anything less. Not that your life span is short, but the world’s life span is short. It is being destroyed every day. Sprint your nervous legs towards the finish line of language! And we’re not so good at capturing ourselves, but thank God, because if humans were fluent in human, new art would cease.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“There will always be more exciting things. Casinos will blink with avenues of exhilaration and offers to be devilish. The shelf of alcohol behind the bar looks like it may have a good read for you. A Chinese restaurant will buzz with customers and ticket orders. A booming concert may scream it has an extra spot, with strobe lights to hide your human. Partying people do not look like people who weep. You’ll think literature has no relevance to them. But eventually, the light will die down and the world will need to return home again. The fire will give out and the coals will glow and when the rising smoke clouds our vision, we will look for what we need: hearth. And there, the ignored is seen again. Asked for. There are exciting days, but the moment our flames die and we shiver honestly in our freezing universe, we will return to our homes, coming to what we need to, like mothers, like old love poems, like stringed instruments, like heroes.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“He thought about doing more reading. It seemed the most comforting activity to do, except for one issue. Unlike a new movie, there was no one to immediately turn and talk to about a book. All books are strays. Books were read at the same time they were unknown at the same time they were revived at the same time they were forgotten. There was no agreed-upon trend of a novel. People found them on their own and all at different stages of life. This was why it was special to have the same favorite authors as a stranger, since both souls were in need of and privately searching for the same thing. A chapter could mean so much. But because Andrei could not share his excitement with anyone without misunderstanding or respectfully feigned interest, he ruled out reading as an activity. And it takes too long to find someone who lived for the same page as you.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“A lonely shivering afterward awaits your last sentence, like the wind that blows on the last man standing in a war, heaving on a battlefield no one will remember. Creation isn’t hard. Sleeping in two places at once is hard. Once you create, someone else holds you—on their desk. In the backseat. On their phones. Between their palms. Behold eternal agitation. Writers embark on a revolutionary idea only to be congratulated by katydids. Hearts spill on 8.5x11’s, scratching away their disguise, and then return to lunchtime feeling less than an inch themselves. How do you expect to survive?”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“Many more looked around at happy and unhappy things alike, left the room, and agreed to the pen. It’s a weird occasion, writing is. It appears as peaceful, silent years of nothing, but implies the valor of someone fighting a lifelong monster. To decide to wield the pen is a win with no victory. But some lines of theirs were more important than satisfaction. What is a bookshelf but a place for us to see all the nights our dearest of friends did not see their own?”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“The soldier was the greatest speaker, the sailor the best musician, and the post office worker the best poet—for life entered them and came out another way—never forced—yet because we couldn’t locate them, or their works, other speakers spoke and never went to war, and other musicians played who never listened to the sea, and new poets poeticized dryly without ever leaving their apartments, nobly forfeiting a normal place in the world, and created art in mediocre attempts, but it was necessary to try, because if they didn’t, we wouldn’t find them either.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“There’s so much ‘expression’ today you can’t hear the real problems. Maybe we switch tasks. To trust our current exhibitions can do their job. It is worth a try. A generation sacrificing their pride to save the future. Granted, our art is needed and could reveal our faults, but do evil men watch movies? Something soon must die. To trust the future will take care of itself is to deny an obvious and necessary revolution.”

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Book:The Goodbye Song
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“And it seemed fitting both for Andrei, and hypothetically the creators of the film, that when he got up to leave in the middle of it, he did so as an ode to the film. A statement of departure that said: 'If you made the movie for the reason I think you did, perhaps you wouldn’t be offended that I left the damn place and decided to chase after life. Inspiration is unlimited, but time is not. Thank you. Goodbye!' He left the poet’s book in the seat beside him, took his popcorn and soda, and exited the cinema the way the writers would have wanted.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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“Everything was predictable. Cinema had act structures. Music had beats. Poets had tricks. Books had arcs. Food tasted delicious as long as it was on the surface of one’s tongue. Any chance of happiness was but one single carousel round, so naturally, after a while, the passenger felt expired. To Andrei, there ceased to be anything worth chasing and this feeling of “running out” in an abundant globe confused him. He wished there was something in the world that was infinite or lasted forever—or was at least worth remembering forever. This was why the sleeper could not dream—his imagination writhed in his true-to-life gluttony.”

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Book:A Happy Ghost
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