Quotes from Brock Clarke

There is always someone smarter than you; you'd think we die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we're too stupid to feel it.

You can never tell how you sound over the phone, that evil piece of machinery, and I would stop using one, we all would, if only there weren't these great distances we need to put between us and the people we need to talk to.

I also empathized, because she'd tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this - the ability to empathize with the people we hate - is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anyone would want to be one.

In truth I was very pleased with myself and with my story and all that had happened in it. Because you can't help being impressed with your own story. Because if you're not impressed with your own story, then who will be?

And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.

That was his phrase - "the high ramparts of my defensiveness"- and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

How did he get so terribly smart, so determined? Maybe it was the pain I'd caused that made him that way, and if that were true, then I'd sort of had a hand in it, in making him as smart and devious as he was. I was really starting to dislike the guy. But I also felt a little proud, like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster turned on him, because after all, it was Dr. Frankenstein who had made the monster strong and cunning enough to turn on him.

Because this is one of the things I learned from Exley: anything can be a beginning as long as you call it one.

You could have saved her," he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you haven't done enough and you're afraid it's too late to start.

This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I'll admit, because up to now I'd not done much more than be, and when I wasn't just being, I'd caused some pain, too.

I almost touch her on the arm as she touched me on the arm, to console her. But I fear that my touch won't tingle her arm as hers tingled mine, and how unbearably sad that would be.

I had what, I wanted, it was with me, in the room, including the room itself. Was it possible that we hear that voice not when we want something else but when we're in danger of losing the things we already have?

Some of the books I'd read had told me that love is fleeting; some of the other books I'd read had told me that love is eternal. But they were wrong. Love isn't either of those things. Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.

When we say we know something in our bones, we mean we don't know yet how we know what we know. This is what we mean by "bones.

I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral.

Detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don't want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don't deserve to forget.

Maybe that's the problem with being someplace beautiful: it makes it impossible to live anywhere else that's not.

Why wasn't it more difficult? ... Shouldn't some things be difficult?

I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was "A Fictional Memoir." I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn't make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy.

If a book is made up of things that are hard to believe, then we were like something out of a book.

This was yet another good thing about drinking, of course: not that drinking made you forget things, but that it made it possible for you to plausibly pretend you'd forgotten things.

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.

Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.

It was a complicated look. I remember thinking that, and I also remember thinking that you had to have known someone for a really long time to be able to look at him like that, and he had to have known you for a really long time to be able to understand it.