Quotes from Kevin Brockmeier

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

The game had to be played the same way every day or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life, that you were in control, would break.

I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.

She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something-for finally getting to know him. She that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.

There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it.

But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.

She had always been a person of ticklish sensibilities, easily overcome by the ordinary frictions of life.

The people were created in the image of God and thus they were within the precinct of His grace, even the ones who didn't know Him...the ones who withdrew themselves from His presence.

Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be.

You never really know. Lately Kevin has been bothering himself with the idea that nothing is certain, nothing can be proven. Not one thing, not in all the world. The sun will rise tomorrow. Prove it. The sun rose this morning. Prove it. The sun is in the sky. Prove it. There's a sun at all. Prove it. The world is like a box of Kleenex, every doubt pulling another along behind it. You can always find a new reason to distrust the facts.

A consensus slowly gathered among us. We had given up something important, we believed: the fire, the vigor, that came with a lack of ease. We had lost some of the difficulty of our lives, and we wanted it back.

People say they want to die in their own home. But me, I was ready for the hospital. The sterilized sheets, the machines, the whole bit. It just seemed easier there. Easier to cast myself off, I mean.

If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire.

Sometimes, in the long hours of a summer afternoon, when the paralegals at their desks are seeking a distraction, they watch the ghost emerging from her pleat in space and time and wonder if their lives will slip by like hers did, leaving them fastened so hopelessly, so desperately, to the past. As if a life could work any other way. As if that weren't precisely what a life must do.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young. —Italo Calvino

Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse — you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep.

The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only as long as they remember us.

Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step?

Luka had been the Adam to her Eve, the Friday to her Robinson Crusoe, the Master to her Margarita. None of them were stories that left room for anyone else.

Their faces are like sunlight on water, a thousand tumbling jacks of white and silver.

He feels the way he used to feel passing love notes to girls in elementary school. Do you like me? the notes always read. Check yes or no. But he is older now and his question is older, too, not Do you like me? but Shouldn't someone?

There were moments where I could make her laugh so unselfconsciously that she felt like a child again, expanding into her past as she was moving into her future.