Jen Kirkman Quotes

I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don't really know me.

Lisa understands me. I'm very complex, but I have trouble opening up to people. I tend to keep things to myself. All my life, I've been kind of shy - opening up is always a challenge and Lisa can understand that.

Those small things, like giving a hug to man, I try to avoid it. Because I can see the situation is coming, and I try to prepare. But I remember the first time I did it, I was 16, and I was at the gymnasium, and it was a cosmopolitan thing, an international thing, a modern thing, but I never felt at ease with it at all.

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

One of the illusions that we live by is that we can really know anybody else, and we're often surprised by traits in people that we thought we knew very well. The struggle to overcome loneliness, which is sort of our universal burden, leads us to leap to conclusions about who other people are.

She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.

It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.

All our relationships, especially the deep ones, stir up the deepest issues for us that we need to confront and work with.

Then relationship happens. Before that it is just an empty name. Relationship cannot happen before the egos are gone.

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. Only when one is connected to one's own core is.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

When you look back... on your love affairs... what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself.

With some of the bad things that come with love, there's also a lot of good. For example that connection... which I struggle to have with most people.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.

I'm a little bit antisocial and I recently discovered that I'm introverted. But the love between people makes me alive.

Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.

Love is an intensification of life.

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

You're all I care about," I said. "No. And me. The person I am when I'm with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I'm with you.

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self.

Even going through the motions is a way of establishing a new relationship with our inner life that is caring and tender, versus one that is judging, distancing or ignoring. This is the beginning of being capable of intimacy with others.