Quotes from Kevin Brockmeier

Sometimes, driving past restaurants that had once been other restaurants, big box stores that had once been wood lots and houses, I imagined that if I could just make the right set of turns, the city would unlock for me, and my car would carry me into the roads of fifteen years ago.

He believed there was a mystery at the center of the great big why-is-there-anything called the universe, and that it did not speak to us, or not in any language we could understand, and that it was an insult to the mystery to pretend that it did.

From the perspective of the dead, life was a dangerous thing: a world of bullets, with everyone dodging everyone else, and no one to blame but God or the cosmos, contingency or fate, whoever had fired the gun.

Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.

Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.

He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction.

The guidance counselor had never married; had hardly even dated. It was better, easier, he had decided, not to disturb anyone with his love or his sadness.

Not long ago he had turned sixty, an age when people hunger for a moment, however small, that will justify the years they have spent and those that still remain to them.

Time and space, he thought. What a hodgepodge.

I think you're confusing God with a genie.

Tell me what you see vanishing and I Will tell you who you are —W. S. Merwin, "For Now

People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.

I'm a Sagittarius, born in the year of the rat, all of which is basically meaningless to me.

I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.

I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page.

The books you love best - those are the immensity of the sea.

How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.

When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.

There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.

Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn't keep a hard eye on herself.

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.