Jenji Kohan Quotes

Relationships can be about yourself, they can be about you and your god, you and your people, you and your family. It can be about a lot of different stuff. And it is.

How do people stay in love, anyway? Is it a choice? Or is it like those plants we studied in biology that mutate into something new and totally different but are still part of the same plant family?

When you don't show up as who you are, people fall in love with who you're not. Then when they find out who you are, that's when they leave.

Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one's life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several.

For the people that I love I only have one face but for some people we can't have one face.

There are a lot of people who go their whole lives without truly knowing what love is, or ever experiencing that.

I expect we are all jealous of the women in their past, but how much less exciting if the women had not kept the bed warm.

Just friends, just friends. Standing there in the bookstore, watching Seth walk away, I half wondered how anyone could still use that line. But I knew why, of course. It was used because people still believed it. Or at least they wanted to.

A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.

Till it has loved, no man or woman can become itself.

I think that when you're in love, you progressively go back to who you are.

Women are often under the impression that men are much more madly in love with them than they really are.

I think, over the course of one's lifetime, there are always certain core elements that are intriguing to you, and you take different looks as you get older, but it's something you keep coming back to. I've always been interested in the relationship between vulnerability and control. That's something that's a big thing for people, whoever they are, no matter how old you are. I think at different times, you're more aware than others.

I think Carl Jung said, you know, I'm gonna paraphrase it badly, but, so much of what we fall in love with in other people is a potential in us that's ready to be realized. We're projecting onto them this amazing thing, but really it's us, and we're very close to integrating it and claiming it. If we do claim it, then we can just love somebody for who they are with all their flaws, but if we don't take that projection back, then we keep wanting them to have that. Then you just realize we're all screwed, that's how it works.

I love women and I love the women I have been with. I always try to be kind and cautious and treat people nice.

In Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline seamlessly knits together the past and present of two women, one young and one old. Kline reminds us that we never really lose anyone or anything or – perhaps most importantly – ourselves.

Men fell in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me.

He had loved and he had found himself. Most people love to lose themselves.

There is no such thing as a soulmate...and who would want there to be? I don't want half of a shared soul. I want my own damn soul.

You know, the thing about life and love is that they are both ever-changing while people seldom are. (Acheron)

I wanted people to trust me, despite anything they'd heard. And more than that, I wanted them to know me. Not the stuff they thought they knew about me. No, the real me. I wanted them to get past the rumors. To see beyond the relationships I once had, or maybe still had but that they didn't agree with.

I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like that.

It's been said that love finds you when you're ready.

I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.