Quotes from Brock Clarke

Under contract!" she shouted. "Under contract!" Dawn sounded so happy, and I thought of my mother, who always distrusted loud public expressions of happiness. "Those who loudly insist on their happiness are rarely happy." Those were my mother's words. But Dawn's chanting of "Under contract!" made me also think of these words by John Calvin: "What shall we then say of chanting, which fills the ears with nothing but an empty sound?

Already, I loved my aunt, and I believe she already loved me. This seems as good a time as any to say that. To love someone is to eventually create the conditions for betraying them. This seems as good a time as any to say that, too. Because this is a story about the things my aunt taught me, and that is one of the things she taught me.

What'd she want?" Her tone chipper as usual. I couldn't hear any suspicion in it. "She wanted to know where I was." "Why didn't you tell her?" "Because she burned down my house." I said, and then added, "And because I don't know where we are.

Who was that?" I asked my aunt "Him?" my aunt said, and I could hear the shrug in her voice. "He's no one." "All right," I said, trying to make my shrug audible, too. But in truth, I was happy to hear Aunt Beatrice say he was no one. It is easier to feel like you're someone if you know someone else is no one.

This is why we'd gotten married in the first place: because we were lonely. I said earlier that we got divorced because Dawn wanted me to move to Charlotte and I wouldn't. But really, we got divorced because we were still lonely and Dawn thought Charlotte would change that and I thought that it wouldn't. And I wondered if this was true for other people: that they got married and divorced for the very same reason.

I took out my phone. It is common knowledge that this is one of the main functions of the cell phone: to give you something to do when you have nothing else to do or when other people are doing something and haven't invited you to be a part of it.

Meanwhile, the Reverend John Lawrence still wanted to know, "Who is that guy?" It was clear that alcohol made the Reverend John Lawrence aggrieved, repetitive, dumb. It had been three hours since I'd first told him who the Sociologist was, and still he wanted to know.

It was the most depressing room I'd ever been in: more depressing than whatever room my parents happened to be arguing in, more depressing than my dad's hospital room, more depressing than my room right before I was made to clean it. Beyond the desk and to the left, I could see a hallway, also dark, and a series of doors on either side of it. It was the kind of hallway you see in nightmares.

It was like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a man sitting on your floor and asking him who he is, what he's doing there, and he doesn't answer, and he doesn't answer, until you gradually realize he doesn't answer because he's a pile of dirty clothes that you were supposed to put in the hamper, and you end up being relieved and then disappointed. The man pushing the vacuum cleaner turned it on when he got to within a foot of me. It whined.

And then I remembered the truck my aunt had stolen, and I wondered if my aunt was rich or if she'd just stolen from rich people, or if there was a difference. My aunt, I suspected, would say that there was no difference. As for John Calvin, he once said that "the torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.

M.'s mother doesn't reply. She just looks at me with her deep, deep black eyes. M. has described to me these eyes and their effect. I believe that M.'s mother respects me for standing my professional ground. I also believe that I will end up being a private detective, if that's what M.'s mother really wants me to be.

I realize that I keep saying that I did not find this out and that out until later. But eventually I did, and eventually, I promise, I will tell you all about it. As John Calvin himself says, "Whenever the Lord holds us in suspense and delays his aid, he is not therefore asleep, but, on the contrary, regulates all His works in such a manner that he does nothing but at the proper time.

I ended up learning so many things from my aunt. And one of those things was to always wait three seconds before responding to anything that might be important. This was why she so often adjusted her glasses. To buy her those three seconds. So that she'd make sure to take the time to decide whether the first thing she'd wanted to say was the right thing.

The bald eagle was still soaring above them, too, showing them that anything was possible, even a return from near extinction, as long as you had a little help.

Because when you say you miss someone, you also mean you miss the way you were before you started missing someone.

I was so mad at her, and I didn't know what to say. Apparently, when you're mad at someone and you don't know what to say, you say something you don't mean and you hope you're not made to regret it. "If I go home," I said, "I'm not coming back.

Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end. I was in love with A Fan's Notes, just like my dad was. And I was in love with my dad, just like I was in love with A Fan's Notes. I wanted both of them to last forever.