Quotes from Things We Know by Heart

Jessi Kirby ·  304 pages

Rating: (9.4K votes)


“But it's terrifying to realise how much of your world is wrapped up in loving another person”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those." - Michael Nolan”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“For so long, I was the one with his heart. I just need to see where it is now.” - Quinn”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“It’s too much, this. Life, and love, and how fragile it all is.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Little victories, they're the ones that counts.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



“We lie together, quiet, under an endless sky, beside a bottomless ocean, and we don’t talk about how these are all the things that brought us together. We don’t talk about how we wouldn’t change any of them.We don’t have to, because these are the things we know by heart.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“I'd give anything right now to go back, even just for a few moments, so I could pay more attention. Inscribe every detail of him, and of us together, onto my heart, where I could keep it safe always. Where even time couldn't erase it.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Today feels different because yesterday was different.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Each heartbeat begins with a single, electrical impulse, or "spark." The distinctive sound we hear through a stethoscope, or when we place our head on a loved one's chest, is the sound of the heart valves opening and closing in perfect synchronicity with each other. It is a two-party rhythm - a delicate dance of systole and diastole, which propels the heart's electrically charged particles through its chambers roughly every second of the day, every day of our lives.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Do what I tell you, when I tell you, and the worst thing that'll happen is you'll fall in love.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



“...we found our own synchronicity together, his heart thumping out a slow. steady beat and mine filling in the spaces between”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he know that every day is Doomsday.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“She has that kind of manic focus about her, like if she just keeps moving, the things she's upset about can't catch her.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“A thousand fireworks explode inside me, and I feel them in him too, in his lips on mine, and his hands in my hair, and he way we pull each other closer. Everything else falls away, and in this moment, when we touch, we are light.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“The days passed, one after another, measured out in an unbroken, never-ending rhythm.Seemingly infinite, but gone in the blink of an eye—like waves crashing on the shore, or the seasons passing.
Or the beating of a heart.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



“What I mean is,how does he somehow know to show me things I didn’t realize I needed to see, or take me places I wouldn’t have guessed I needed to go?”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those.” —Michael Nolan”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Listen,” he says. “I know earlier I said just a day, but that was…I wasn't being completely honest. And I know if I let you get in your car and drive away again without telling you the truth, I’ll regret it all the way home.”
He drops his eyes to the ground for a moment, then brings them back up to mine. “Anyway. I promise I won’t surprise you at your door again, but if you ever decide you want another day–ever–I have lots of them, and I …I liked this one.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“You’re okay,” she says. “It’s just your first time back out here. You don’t need to go back.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“She has no idea how careless I’ve already been, or that I know that heart of his maybe even better than he does.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



“We are made of our pasts, and our pains, our joys and our losses. It's in the very fiber of our beings. Written on our hearts.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“All our firsts, and our lasts, and everything in between. They swirl and dance on the invisible currents, and then one by one, they disappear to a place they will always be a part of.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Our first kiss was soft, sweet. A question on my lips. He tasted like the watermelon bubble gum he was always chewing, and the stolen summer night.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Because when these tiny little things are afraid, they shine.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“It's terrifying to realize how much of your world is wrapped around loving another person.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



“I had a good day. For the first time in a very long time, I really did, which is why I almost don’t want to wash it away tonight. I like the feel of the salt and the sand on my skin, like a reminder that there is a whole world that’s alive and continuing on out there. And that today I was a part of it again.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“I spent the first few months under the full weight of those regrets, thinking of a thousand different things I would've done differently had I known they were going to be the last.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“We should get these wet clothes off," I say conscious now of the cold.
A smile breaks over Colton's face. He raises an eyebrow. "Yeah?”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Questions are dangerous territory for us.”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart


“Scientists have identified individual neurons, which fire, when a particular person has been recognized. Thus, [it is possible that] when a recipient’s brain analyzes the features of a person, who significantly impressed the donor, the donated organ may feed back powerful emotional messages, which signal recognition of the individual. Such feedback messages occur within milliseconds and the recipient [may even believe] that [he] knows the person.” —“Cellular Memory in Organ Transplants”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart



About the author

Jessi Kirby
Born place: in Granada Hills, CA, The United States
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Popular quotes

“He's so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they're holding in their hand.”
― Alexandra Bracken, quote from The Darkest Minds


“A real diamond is never perfect.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from All the Light We Cannot See


“The Goliath Corporation was to altruism what Genghis Khan was to soft furnishings.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from The Eyre Affair


“One day you do meet a man who kisses you and you can’t breathe around it and you realize you don’t need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset. To touch the one you love. To try again.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Shadowfever


“The Western States nervous under the beginning change.
Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico,
Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land.
Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants
the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land
--wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is
the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor
were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor
turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good.
Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as
we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor
does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land.
There is little difference between this tractor and a tank.
The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think
about this.

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car
creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a
single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered.
And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another
family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat
on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the
node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these
two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each
other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the
zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split
and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our
land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and
perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still
more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have
none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little
food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction.
Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are
ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-
meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women;
behind, the children listening with their souls to words their
minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby
has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's
blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb.
This is the beginning--from "I" to "we."

If you who own the things people must have could understand
this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate
causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx,
Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive.
But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes
you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we."

The Western States are nervous under the begining
change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action.
A half-million people moving over the country; a million
more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the
first nervousness.

And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Grapes of Wrath


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