Quotes from Brock Clarke

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions.

If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn't have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van.

Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.

Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.

All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs

But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company.

Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.

Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Can a story actually do anything at all?

When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.

There's nothing as quiet as that moment before one person is about to tell another something neither of them wants to hear.

Maybe this was another reason why people read: not so that they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

But then again, I was pretty certain I'd make more mistakes, so I didn't dwell on the one I'd just made too long. This is another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: if you make a mistake, don't dwell on it too long, because you'll make more of them.

Because this is one of the things I learned on my own: you need to say things simply, especially when they're complicated.

When he did that, I didn't hate him anymore, I really didn't, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people that who love them: because it's so easy to stop hating someone if you've already started loving them.

They [my eyes] immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes' way of forbidding you to look away,of forcing you to look at the world you've made or unmade.

The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it's your crowd, you're the only one it's looking for.

Apparently, you become yourself to someone when that someone finally learns your secrets.

I think, that love endures, but that it isn't everything, and it isn't ever what we want it to be...

They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love.

You can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated.

After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life.

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail — the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions – and so I didn't pay much attention to those letters at all.