Top 70 Karl Kristian Flores Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “All rich things look the same, but poor things always look different.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

2. “There’s so much to understand about a good collarbone.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

3. “The classroom is a special place. It’s one of the few times a group of different people have to be in the same room. Outside, it’s only strangers in subway rides for a few minutes. It’s rare. We never really know people again.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

4. “My greatest fear is that she’ll look at me sad and say, “If you fought one day more, I’d have said yes.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

5. “Joy is a flower that pain grows best.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

6. “You might find no one. Love is one in a trillion. We’re eight billion.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

7. “I wonder how many people would care about the world if they could do it anonymously. It’s fine to believe what we want, but it’s not fine to think people are less than us because they think different. Different is beautiful. Variety is gracious. We live in a time of two: you or me. It’s so cold.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

8. “Knowing you was like finding out the secrets of the universe and leaving you is like being expected to somehow forget them all.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

9. “In a moving world filled with endless distractions, time is the most valuable currency. When someone gives you theirs, they cut a slice of their life span and serve it to you. In their brief existence, in their undeterminable episode of consciousness, you were chosen. And the equation goes: with others, you mean.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

10. “I was just singing and you didn’t need to sing back – but I caught you dancing.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

11. “There is no moving on, just moving with.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

12. “Because I have nobody and nowhere to go, I’m forced to think of everyone everywhere I am.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

13. “And we’ll act like some people mean nothing to us, but we don’t live very long. When you get older, you’ll see: a week with someone is enough to cry about for a lifetime.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

14. “Least thing we can do is to wake up in the morning and protect the good things that were. The past deserves it.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

15. “I am grateful that you, journal, can look at me without closing your covers. Sometimes, that’s all I do: open and close you, open and close, all afternoon on my bed, expecting you to shut on me, but you never do.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

16. “Death is the ultimate vacation: you’re with the stars, you don’t have to pay rent, everyone loves you, and nothing hurts. So, it’s very important you save death for later.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

17. “We discard the elderly, but the elderly used to discard the elderly. Those old people we tease are just listening to our insults and not deciding to speak. They’re not stupid. They just understand. Old people are young people who’ve had a few more heartbreaks, thousands of more workdays, and who’ve prepared a dozen more eulogies.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

18. “When walking into a room, worry not. Everyone else is afraid. People are scared of people who are scared of people.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

19. “Make eye contact as they break your heart. Don’t blink. You are staring at Love beginning to transform itself. Love is realized through people.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

20. “My affection for you is attached to whatever self I possess – an inherent, eternal synchronization... an automatic response to living... transforming from hit to misses, from Ms. to Mrs...”

— Karl Kristian Flores

21. “I can’t say anything though. Even if it’s true I’d sound like a prick. Believe that. How can we even – Christ! That’s the problem with people living however they want. When anything goes, reason is no longer credible. You can’t point out trouble. If the truth is offered, and they don’t want it, they get to say the truth is a lie. Autonomy is now prioritized over understanding.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

22. “Trauma and tragedy will continue to cook, that is until one day, one person chooses to do something good for no reason.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

23. “I hate this, but it’s true: being with happy people freaks me out,′ she said. ‘When I see them, all I could think about is how quickly their joy could end. A punch to the face. One phone call. Some hard truth. A shatter of ego. Or a house fire. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Maybe my brain needs some sort of contrast. I get scared for them. Eggshells who care about things like almond milk. I get jealous actually. I think, ‘How could you be that way?”

— Karl Kristian Flores

24. “If we meet a hundred people who are all attractive, available, and all have equal characteristics, what the hell is that thing reaching in our stomach that goes, “But that one! That one!” If it’s not love that separates one person from everyone else who’s all the same, then I don’t know what it is.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

25. “Productivity is now sold as a lifestyle. People hustle away and grind for the sake of grinding. New calendars. New dry erase markers. New journals. But when they write in advanced journals, they write of goals and next steps – never of thoughts and secrets. When they write of goals, their goals are to have more goals. So you abandon the empty castle that is productivity and enter the little cottage of your funny heart.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

26. “There are some females in the world who slip away from the public eye. You might see them walking past you in the lobby or behind the tinted windows of a limousine. They travel so much, you might only meet them in hotels. Last night, you wondered if you’d ever see those intelligent women again. How can any man be good enough for them?”

— Karl Kristian Flores

27. “Upon scanning the sky, you don’t really know when one color turns into another hue. And that’s sort of how I fell for you. No definitive line or moment, just a slow blend of time inked by the earth’s unexplainable.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

28. “Everything happens for a reason? No. Everything happens and we’re the reason.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

29. “The free man knows people don’t ask for him. They ask for things: work, your hands – never you.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

30. “Why do I have to exhaust myself trying to pretend to enjoy someone’s company? Or to like something? It hurts everyone involved. I laugh at their bad jokes and they continue to say them. I answer, “I’m great,” and we grow farther apart, or I say “yes” and lose another night where I could be alone instead. The nicest thing we can tell some people is that we are better off without them.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

31. “We are not always someone else’s half, but they can be ours. You’d think two halves make a whole, but some two halves make a hole.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

32. “Life would be enough to know what you do in a day.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

33. “The best lover you could ever have will sit on this very bench 270 years from now. You two will never meet. And will never know you’ll never meet. They are, however, currently sitting with you because if you two did meet, you’d spend your time sitting as you are now. Because returning to that bench every afternoon, happily single, was like spending a day with every soul who wants to sit there too.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

34. “These are icebreakers. You’re not supposed to break the ice, you’re just supposed to coat your voice with as many layers of confidence as possible so that they don’t hear your voice shake when it’s your turn to speak. Idiot.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

35. “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.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

36. “There are seconds of remembering you throughout the day – moments when my heart twitches. Moments when I am hell-bent on forgetting your heaven-sent scent.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

37. “I suppose we all see colors outside our usual spectrum in certain people. And the saddest part of life is having known what it looks like and saying goodbye while a quiet part of you hopelessly searches for it forever in shades of blue, red, and yellow. Perhaps all my writing is just a telling to others of the color I saw.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

38. “Curiosity has and will always conquer fear.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

39. “I look out and I almost get the point.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

40. “Beat him until he softens. Lift his ragged body and raise him with your whiskey breath. Get him out alive. Watch from your grave as he beats his own child, because you beat him, because yours beat you, because his beat his, because his beat his...”

— Karl Kristian Flores

41. “You are the silence of my thoughts, the alleyways of my brain, the thought in between other thoughts that live, the space between every look I give. In split seconds of my mortality, there you are – my sweet neutrality.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

42. “At one point, all of us must be lost in a desert. It’s an excellent sanction. If we never have that trial, I struggle to see how else we can find ourselves.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

43. “There are no rules. Everything in your radius was made from hesitant decisions by hesitant men. It was all a gamble and it only appears absolute. But anything that exists is proof that it can change.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

44. “Do you have an opinion or did you just become everyone else?”

— Karl Kristian Flores

45. “Parliament will also struggle with Shakespeare. Rappers stutter too when they flirt. The palms of poised politicians sweat. Police officers fart. Princesses get wedgies. Royal Guards had to keep from laughing. The last rep in the gym will make any arm shake. Presidents had to apply. Rome fell.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

46. “Things always look ugly on other people, but the truth is, we all start as other people. The sad part is we usually die as other people. And worst of all, we never knew we were the other people all along.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

47. “Don’t tell the wealthy that the nightly humming they hear in order to sleep is made possible from the distant wheels of a midnight cart being rolled by a man who dreams of a bed.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

48. “Make tea. As the water boils, you think about the “her’s” like a love list. Valerie in the 4th grade, Naomi in the 6th, Linda in high school, Sammie in college, Camille from work, and the latest one to have signed your heart and left: Sophia. You think through each girl, wondering what she’s eating for breakfast. You miss them, not because you want a relationship, but because love only works in permanent marker.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

49. “With movement comes identity.”

— Karl Kristian Flores

50. “We use our eyes to see, but we use our voice to know.”

— Karl Kristian Flores