Charlotte Eriksson Quotes

the world is being built up by greedy people wanting higher towers and then there's a war or a hurricane or a tsunami or a virus or a financial collapse
happening
to put things in balance.
this has happened all through history and the humankind survives and moves on.
this is not an exception: this is a rule.
and you are not granted to stay here, that is not your right. you were handed a gift of walking here for a little while, breathing the air, feeling things, but did you say thank you? ever? or just took for granted, carried life like a burden and now you're being angry because suddenly things outside of your control are threatening your peace?
why do you let your peace depend on things outside of your control in the first place?

So you will meet many 'someones' who will give a new definition to your name.
And you can not build walls, must not close the door and please don't hide,
because if you ask me about hurt
and love
I will say love. Love because the hurt will come and go no matter what, but only love makes it worth while. Only love can cure it.
Don't be scared. Go. Love.

So I died many times that year.
In the cold, in the storm, on the run or on the drunk for my heart did not want to beat
but kept on beating anyway
and my pain was as real as real can be,
and I tried to learn and deal and run and feel
but nothing really worked.

I built a comfortable home in my sorrow and settled into a quiet living. No sparks or grand gestures, just a simple daily hymn to comfort. The leaves fell off the trees and coloured this city in all kinds of pretty, and some days that was enough to make me smile at least a little bit, within.

Are you in love? What makes your heart beat faster? What do you want people to think about when they hear your name.

You will find yourself wanting to leave and go home at the same time, and there is nothing you can do about this.

This is the story of a girl gone mad while trying to find a little bit of love.

You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.

The world is filled with so many beautiful people after all and who am I to think that you will hold on, hold on to me, because who am I and what are we?

It all takes time and lessons and places, but I'm learning to listen to my restless heart, telling me to go, go, go!

And the rain drops kept falling like the sweetest music
leaving tears on the glass,
which is what music does to me
most of the time
but silence too. and rain.

And what am I? I'm forever stuck in a nonexistent place where no time passes and I do so much and learn so much but I don't grow. I'm still teenage me wanting more. Wanting less. Wanting anything and everything and I think I should grow up now. Grow out of childish anxiety and sorrows for all things past and everyone has moved on from schools and neighbourhoods and I moved first and swore the loudest on never coming back but now I dream about all things past. Going back. How do you transition from being a lost teenager, to one of those calm and serene souls of integrity and certainty? Because that's what I must do, now, soon. Do others feel left behind too, or is it just me? Like the train left with everyone on it and I'm still standing on the platform trying to decide if I should watch the sky for another hour or go change my ticket. Maybe sometimes you need to just close your eyes and jump on the train without feeling ready, and grow your steady breath on the way. I think sometimes you don't know how much you're capable of until you're forced to grow into it.

And isn't the world a treasure in itself? A spectacle glittering every single day, without a concern if anyone's watching or not. It simply goes on, elegantly, letting nature have its way.
We only need to open our eyes to witness the biggest masterpiece ever created, the ticket is already in your hand.

This morning I woke up before the alarm clock went off and the sky outside was a big red ocean. You're beautiful when you're sleeping so I spent an hour observing the way you breathe. Inhale, exhale, without a thought of tomorrow. The window was open and the air was so crisp and I couldn't imagine how to ever ask for more than this.

I am constantly torn between the will to be seen and still hidden so god damn well,
a contradiction I never figured out.

They way I walk now
you'd have a hard time recognising me,
on these streets
where I once imagined walking with you.
Hand in hand,
like we always did,
and it never mattered where we were going
because it was all just fine.
I was always fine.
But they rest restlessly in my pockets now,
in a new town,
on these new streets,
and it's heavy to stay standing
for my body is half the size
when you're gone
and these buildings are tall and old and beautiful
and I wonder what secrets they hold.
How to stand so proud after so many years
because I'm still young but I feel worn
and I get through the days on too much caffeine and mood altering chemicals
to stay awake long enough to make the poetry come alive.
I fall asleep on the floor with the music still playing
when my neighbour leaves for the office
and I'm jealous.
I wonder what it's like to go outside and know where to go,
know where you want to end up
and just simply go there.
I've been making lists of things I want to do,
where to go
and who to be,
now that you're gone,
and it's nice and all,
it's just …
I'd rather write it with you,
and go there with you.
Be things
with you.

There were days when I still put on make up
in case you'd come back,
but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rain,
eat when I can and sleep when I can

I have lost and loved and won and cried myself to the person I am today.

Sometimes you have to realise that things will never change if you don't make a change yourself, and sometimes, you need to realise that it only happened so that you could learn something.

Make someone feel something and you will never be forgotten.

Hurting people you love is the heaviest kind of regret.

There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a word. No questions, no asking why, just quietly lay there with you, observing the stars, until you're ready to get back up on your feet again and walk the last bit home, softly holding your hand as a quiet way of saying "I'm here".
It was a beautiful night.

My mind is killing me
- The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind

Freedom is a privilege that can suffocate you if you don't know how to handle it and on days like this
I don't know how to handle it.

I am the contrast. I am forever the crack in the window that lets the winter in. I am forever the moment between laughter and tears, happiness and sadness. I am light and darkness. I am fire and ice. You will try to take me into your life, but I won't fit, and you will not know how to tell me that there is simply
no place for me.
There is simply no place for a girl like me.

I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.

You know, love is not dependent on circumstances. Love just is.
You feel love for someone. You feel a great amount of gratitude towards their soul, their being, because they simply exist and are a part of your life and your world.
You just simply love them.
Love formed around conditions or circumstances is something else. That's expectations. Marriage. Silent promises that no one wants to keep saying "I will unconditionally love you on those conditions".
But love just is. I love you. I love the way you live your life. I love that I get to be a part of it.
As simply and softly as that.

You need to belong to yourself, and let others belong to themselves too. You need to be free and detached from things and your surroundings. You need to build your home in your own simple existence, not in friends, lovers, your career or material belongings, because these are things you will lose one day.

I don't want to be a critic of the world. I want to encourage it.

I have found no other cure for loneliness than to befriend it.

I didn't do music to live; I lived so that I could do music.

Leave that room, kid. Shut the screen off. Take your dirty shoes, not the pretty ones, and go out to feel the wind. Touch water. Touch earth. Touch wood, touch skin, touch everything you can touch and memorise everything because that's all you will live off in the end, and that's all you will need.

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend's sisters,
I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.

See, my aim is not to survive but to be thrown to the wolfs with adrenaline still pumping in my veins and hear the gods laughing saying "that was one hell of a youth" and everything I do I do in order to push my senses and levels of natural ecstasy. I want to be so awake that I pass out by exhaustion every night with a smile on my face and no thoughts of tomorrow because today was all I ever could make of it and I am sick and tired of boredom. Bored people slumbering boring words about bored habits and I want to get out.

I want to be the one you turn to for guidance and comfort. I want to create things that become a source of stability for people, some sort of home. Write books that you read until the edges are torn and songs that you listen to in your headphones on a lonely night bus, taking you somewhere far far away.I want to be so sure of my own place in the universe that no one could ever doubt me. What I'm about or what I'm here to do. I want to be a safe aura in a sea of worries and uncertainty. I want to stand for clarity where only chaos seems to grow.

There comes a time for healing
no matter how broken you are right now;
no matter how heavy your heart is right now.
There comes a time when you will go outside
and let the sun shine on your face
and let the wind touch your hair
and you will not be tired by just simply being awake.
There comes a time when you will be happy to be alive again
and that day you will appreciate your own being
because now you know the other side.
Now you know the opposite.
Now you know what it's like to not be sure if you really are; who
you really are;
if you simply are, anymore.
And that day
will be the beginning of everything.

So they gave me love in form of poison and tiny little pills, programming my emotions, teaching me how to feel. To act correct and talk correct and answer without knowing the question, because that, my dear, is how you get love. Yes that, dear youth, is how you'll be loved. I tried to medicate my own fucked up little mind with chemicals and adrenaline, tasting sweeter every night, shaking louder every time. Sitting wide awake in bed until the world disappears, writing poetry to concentrate on something real while waiting for the love to arrive.
I've been looking for it night after night, waiting patiently for it to show up, maybe somewhere in between the state of awake and asleep, alive and not so alive, sober and not so sober.
(I lost track of the difference somewhere in between.)

So now it's this thing I do.
I go away, ever so often, by myself, for myself,
to new places with foreign streets I haven't walked yet,
and there I wander, up and down, watching people going places I don't know
and it always hits me that they're never alone,
always with someone,
and I wonder how they would spend a day all on their own in a foreign city with nothing to do and no one to see,
and I wonder if they'd be happy.
Just simply being free,
like I am trying to be.
Happy.
Just simply being me.

I know I'm only 21 and what do I know about life and love and what really matters? But my promise to myself while writing this book was to tell my story, no one else's. To write the story of my life so that I can remember it in the way I want to remember it. To write this down in an attempt to make it better, to make my story come alive.

We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it's hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh air
and realise you can't get up. You're too far down.

Throwing yourself into the purse of a dream is the biggest adventure you can take on.

I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn't get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away.

I want to remember to notice the wonders of each day, in each moment, no matter where I am under any circumstance.

When someone's success makes you as happy as if it were your own, you know you've found someone worth holding on to.

Being a person who pushes himself to his or her own limits in order to become as great as he or she can possibly be means being a person who is constantly faced with some kind of fear. May it be mental or physical, may you be an athlete or a writer, YOU are facing fear, every single day, by doing something your mind or body never did before. But by overcoming that fear you take one step higher on the ladder, and the goal is to take those steps every single day.

There are things that will happen to you and there is nothing you can do about this. Isn't it exciting beyond belief?

A big group of daily friends or a white painted house with bills and mirrors, are not a necessity to me - but an intelligent conversation while sharing another coffee, is.

It's hard to make people care again once you've taught them not to. It's hard to tell people that you need them, once you've told them you don't.

So I forced myself to step out of my comfort zone and go out and connect with people. I realised that no one knew me here. I could become whoever I wanted to be for these people, and that became my courage.

It's 4am again and I'm just getting started. People are boring and I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed through my words. I want to get all fucked up and write real and raw and ugly and beautifully. I bet you're sleeping safe and calm, and you can stay there, it's safer there, and you wouldn't stand one night on this journey my mind wanders off to every night you close your eyes. I'll stay here one day and I will never come down.
I promise I can fly before I hit the ground.
It doesn't even hurt anymore.
I swear, it doesn't hurt.

So find your own combination of things to learn and see and be passionate about. Learn from everyone but be your own guidance, and you will find a red-hot feeling in your chest each night, eager for the possibilities of a new day. No one knows your heart as well as you do.

How does one know you've "made it"?
You no longer feel like you have anything to prove to anyone. You have no regrets or resentments from the past, anger that you're working from. No people you want revenge on or songs you want to sing in order to finally speak your mind.
Instead, you work from a place of wanting to do the work only, without any attachment to the outcome.

It's just as hard to go back to a place you once left, as it is to leave it again.

It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in limits. It's about reaching beyond your so-called potential, because your potential is never where you or anyone else expects it to be, not even close. It's about being able to say with the last breath of your life I used all my potential and all my talents and pushed myself to the limit. I could not have fought any harder.

But I believe that music can change a life, because it changed mine.

Spend more time doing things that make you forget about the time.

5.57am and I'm finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn't get much easier.

I stood in your doorway this morning
dreaming you'd turn around
you'd tilt your head
you'd softly whisper "stay"

or that you'd grab my arms
to shake me while asking
what the hell are we doing
we love
each other
and this is not right
so we will make this work
now stay!

You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal man
with your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked on
and the streets are so clean here people rushing to work
and maybe I should be too
by now
at this age
this stage
this town.

I will stand in that doorway
dreaming
for many nights to come.

Being passionate about something is the most beautiful characteristic you can develop.

All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality.

You're under no obligation to be who people think you are. Change, grow, rearrange yourself. Free and beautiful things always bloom and spark with no holding back.

You smoked another cigarette and we shared another coffee and it was just another morning that made me realise that this is all it takes to be happy.

It's January and I'm kicking snow off the ground. I just threw out the flower you made me promise to water, handle with care, because I was too careless, you said. Careless with things and people, around me and behind
and I remember being still for just a second or two, thinking that it's so much easier to leave and start anew, than take care of what's already here.

I wonder about everyone I meet and everyone I've ever met and I wonder how they are, what they're doing, if they're happy, if they're with someone. I hope they are. I hope they're all happy. I hope they're all with someone.

It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be, with no effort or trying and slowly we found each other's hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hope
that things will go on and get better
and that things and people and views are still out there, yet to be found.

I'm not everything I want to be, but I'm more than I was, and I'm still learning.

I've been trying to stay real
and true and proud of who I am,
all those ideals of how to look
I've been trying not to care.

But I'm still holding my breath,
I 'm still watching every step.
I'm still tip-toeing away,
when I'm getting to ashamed of myself.

I don't want to be your letdown,
I'm scared like hell I'm not enough.
I don't wanna be
your failure anymore.
- The Glass Child, Letdown

I turned myself into an artist because then my life would be about creating meaning out of ugliness and that would be my life, and it was noble. It was the beginning of a journey, the creating of the world every single day and I was not bored. I was ecstasy and creation and nothingness turned into melodies and I was dancing with the spirits.

I feel a new era coming in, standing on the shore, waiting for it to slowly greet me.

I don't believe in the hero that sets out to climb a mountain and achieves it with no setbacks. I he does, he obviously didn't set his goals high enough and shouldn't even have anything to be proud of. He didn't challenge himself enough. He might have learned a thing or two, but the real lessons are taught when you're balancing on the very edge, with one foot over the cliff, everyone expecting you to fall. That's when you realise your potential. Or rather, how far away from your own potential you actually are.

It could be yesterday
when I was less in love
I think
For I didn't see you in the mirror
behind me
while getting dressed.
The way your hands couldn't stay away
and our bodies always found their ways back to each other
as if they were meant to be together
Close.

But then it was today and I saw you
again
in the mirror
behind me while getting dressed

So I go to sleep tonight
alone
without actually falling asleep because I'm scared of the moment I will wake up
and realise it was just a dream
You're actually gone.

Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow
hoping that I will be less in love
again
Like yesterday

But not today.
I was never really well with things at all.

When you think your life is falling apart, it's usually falling together in disguise.

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.

If you can't do it for yourself, you do it for all the other young souls who need to be shown that things are possible. That they too can do that thing they dream of.

I said
"I love you so much it's killing me"
and you kept saying sorry
so I stopped explaining
for it never made sense to you
what always did to me
to let what you love
kill you
and never regret.
As Romeo is dying Juliet says
"I am willing to die to remain by your side"
and love was never a static place of rest
but the last second of euphoria
while throwing yourself out from a 20 store window
to be able to say
"I flew before I hit the ground",
and it was glorious.
Don't be sorry.
The fall was beautiful, dear.
The crash was beautiful.

I can't change the world, I can only change how I choose to live in it.

What I want to know is how you go on when you look around
and don't see anywhere you want to go without the only person
you can't have.

Go outside. Don't tell anyone and don't bring your phone. Start walking and keep walking until you no longer know the road like the palm of your hand, because we walk the same roads day in and day out, to the bus and back home and we cease to see. We walk in our sleep and teach our muscles to work without thinking and I dare you to walk where you have not yet walked and I dare you to notice. Don't try to get anything out of it, because you won't. Don't try to make use of it, because you can't. And that's the point. Just walk, see, sit down if you like. And be. Just be, whatever you are with whatever you have, and realise that that is enough to be happy.
There's a whole world out there, right outside your window. You'd be a fool to miss it.

I go to the ocean to say goodbye.

You can start anew at any given moment. Life is just the passage of time and it's up to you to pass it as you please.

People keep asking what I do for a living and I keep saying that I don't believe in making a living. That it's a concept that has been twisted. I tell them I believe in making a life and money is a distracting object if there's anything left at the end of the day and I just want to go on well. Make it through the day. So I smile and raise my glass and they laugh and take my hand, saying "here's to the youth", pointing at me. And I might just be young
and naive
for I still believe in the freedom of choice
of how to spend your life.
So they toast to the youth, who still think she's free,
and that's all fine by me.

Inspiration is everywhere.

I took him to the river and said "let's watch something drown," So he took a stone
and I took my necklace
and we threw it all together,
the way I always think I will get better in July. Things will change and sounds won't ache
and I gave my heart to uncertainty so many times, and so I took him to the river,
threw the necklace in the river to slowly watch it drown, or burn, or fade away
like I've done so many times.

It was quite a sad thing,
the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I not
when everything I've ever known has slowly gone away.

Dear world, I am excited to be alive in you, and I am thankful for another year.

And I realise the only way to tell the others
is through the way my voice can take these broken words
and turn it into music.
Turn it into poetry.
And I sing to make myself come alive,
but also for you,
because I'd like this to mean something.
To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day
and so now I will tell.
If not for you, then for my own heart,
because it tells me to,
and I'm learning to listen.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night
and I wander these streets like a ritual I don't dare to break
for darling, the times are quite glorious.

I left him by the water's edge,
still waving long after the ship was gone
and if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn't have heard for I've said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I've taught them well.
There's a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew.
I used to go there to say goodbye.
I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them,
one way or the other,
leaving sin on my body
scrubbing tears off with salt
and I built my rituals in farewells.
Endings I still cling to.

So I go to the ocean to say goodbye.

He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head
and though he said he'd come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one
for I have used them myself and there is no coming back.
Minds like ours are can't be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay.

I turned away from the ocean
as not to fall for its plea
for it used to seduce and consume me
and there was this one night
a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells

I'm fighting my way into existence, and I will keep doing so until the end of time.

This world can be quite wonderful once you let yourself be a part of it.

Dear me, one day I'll make you proud.

There's something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

Human interaction. The most complicated form of happiness I will never figure out.

The final magnificent spark of a firework is only the last seconds of the fall. Though it's invisible to most, it's the way up that creates all the impact.

My writing, it's my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write.

I said I liked sunsets
and he said "you should see the sunrise,"
and told me about open fields in Canada, where he'd been. I listened and he talked and my broken heart ached a little lower and not so hard, and I never told him about it, but I think he knew, for by the end of the night he said he liked that I finally smiled and told me to do so more often, and that was just one of many days that didn't turn out the way I had planned, but just like I needed it to, and that's where I'd like to live.
So it's about the endless possibility of every single day.
Be always on your way.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.
You're doing just fine.

Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.

I learn my world through writing.

I built my home in the feeling of waking up at dawn in a new city, where every road is the right road because there is no ordinary. Everything is as profound as you make it.

I believe in knowing who you are but without limiting yourself to your own expectation of who you are.