Quotes from Brock Clarke

And I also know that this is why love allows us to be so cruel to the beloved: so that the beloved doesn't make the mistake of loving us again or loving us for the first time.

You know what else he said?" Anne Marie asked. "Tell me," I said. I didn't want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are.

I took notes as they divided the world between those who had stuff taken away from them, and those who took, those who did bad things in a good way- gracefully, effortlessly- and those bumblers who bumbled their way through life.

I have no idea,' he said, and that's another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: be wary of a man who says, 'I have no idea,' when asked why his wife doesn't like something he's done, which of course is just another way of saying be wary of men in general.

That's not important,' he said, and when Detective Wilson said that, I was sure he didn't know the answer, 'not important' being just one of the things we call that which we don't know.

Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you've done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven't done.

At the time, I thought this was just one of those vague things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know. But it seemed now it was one of those specific things adults say to remind you that you're a kid who doesn't know what adults know.

I confess this is an unforeseen -- unforeseen and, indeed, I did not foresee it -- by-product of journaling: in writing down the facts of one's feelings, one might leave out facts, and one might also try to convince oneself that one's fantasy is, in fact, one's fact, or at least a fact among other facts, other facts that are, in fact, facts, making it most difficult to tell the fact from the fantasy.

I guess you don't know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one.

A tricky bit of business, this believing in someone else. So tricky that we would never do it, if we did not want someone, someday, to believe in us, too.

and then he looks at me in that way of his, that way that suggests you aren't exactly a human being, but rather a possible cog, a potential working part of one of his mysterious ideas.

The truth is that the world is full of bumblers exactly like you, and to think that you're special is just one more thing you've bumbled.

But she didn't ask, and so I added, "You let her believe you were looking for him." Still, my aunt didn't respond. "You lied to her." "I let her lie to herself," Aunt Beatrice corrected. "Which is what you do, Calvin, when you don't want someone you care about to know the truth.

It was quiet in the balcony. I often liked to sit up there and think about pellet stoves and then with my thumbs type my blog on my cell phone. My mother and the minister had no idea I was sitting right above them. This is a good thing to remember in this life: no one ever looks up.

I should have been shocked to see her. But I wasn't. After all, I'd thought, believed, that my mother was dead. I'd wanted her to be dead. And it was very much like my mother to be alive just to show me that what I had thought, believed, wanted, was wrong. "If you desperately want something," my mother wrote in her famous book, "then that is surely proof that you don't deserve to get what you want.

Why didn't my mother ever tell me about you?" I asked my aunt. "Because I was a bad guy," my aunt said, looking directly at me. Her expression wasn't at all far away anymore. Her mouth was closed, but I could picture her missing tooth. My aunt was right: now that she'd said she was a bad guy, I wanted to know more. I wanted to know exactly how and why. "All right," I said instead, and we changed the subject.

Which is to say, I pictured my aunt and now Caroline and then thought of them reading the post, and suddenly I did not want to finish it or publish it, which is why most professional bloggers spend most of their professional lives trying to avoid having that thought, or picturing those people, or having those people in their lives in the first place

Did you read John Calvin as a child, too?" I asked her. My aunt answered by quoting John Calvin: "The effect of our knowledge . . . ought to be, first, to teach us reverence and fear." Which I understood to mean "Yes." Because I, too, had been made to read John Calvin when I was a child,

Charles, on the other hand, was full faced and unshaven and looked overstuffed in his enormous sweatshirt. His oversized sweatshirts always had outsized political messages on them. Today he wore a black sweatshirt. Its message, in large white block letters, read i'm 1776% sure i'm keeping all my guns'.

Did you have sex with me because you wanted to or because you wanted something from me?" "Both," she said immediately, and I know now that she was telling the truth, that she was done lying to me, although at that moment I wasn't yet ready to believe her. "I don't believe you," I said.

It was only after Caroline had admitted lying to me, and only after she'd made me admit that I'd lied to her, were we both fully ready to believe each other. To quote John Calvin one last time, "Not that they may believe against their wills (which would be impossible), but that they may be made willing to believe who were before unwilling to believe.

The trees thinned, the roads grew wider, the number of lanes multiplied, the traffic thickened and slowed, the billboards proliferated. On one of the billboards was this message: you call him "the man upstairs." but he has a name.

But I didn't say this to my aunt. Instead, I said, "America is number one." This had been the campaign slogan of the man who would eventually become our president. Charles Otis, my old classmate and neighbor, was one of his supporters and had taken to wearing a red mesh baseball hat with that slogan on its face, although on Charles's hat the symbol was on the wrong side of the number: AMERICA IS 1#.

Love, love: it was never as pure as you needed it to be. That was the good thing about hate. If you hated someone, really hated him, then you could wish him dead and never once worry that you would change your mind about it.