Brock Clarke Quotes

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

Brock Clarke

#2. 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.

Brock Clarke

#3. They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love.

Brock Clarke

#4. 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.

Brock Clarke

#5. Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

Brock Clarke

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

Brock Clarke

#7. I didn't normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults.

Brock Clarke

#8. There's nothing as quiet as that moment before one person is about to tell another something neither of them wants to hear.

Brock Clarke

#9. 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.

Brock Clarke

#10. There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions.

Brock Clarke

#11. 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.

Brock Clarke

#12. 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.

Brock Clarke

#13. After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life.

Brock Clarke

#14. 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.

Brock Clarke

#15. But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company.

Brock Clarke

#16. Because this is one of the things I learned on my own: you need to say things simply, especially when they're complicated.

Brock Clarke

#17. 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.

Brock Clarke

#18. 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?

Brock Clarke

#19. 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.

Brock Clarke

#20. But then again, I was pretty certain I'd make more mistakes, so I didn't dwell on the one I'd just made too long. This is another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: if you make a mistake, don't dwell on it too long, because you'll make more of them.

Brock Clarke

#21. 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.

Brock Clarke

#22. Apparently, you become yourself to someone when that someone finally learns your secrets.

Brock Clarke

#23. Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.

Brock Clarke

#24. 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.

Brock Clarke

#25. 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.

Brock Clarke

#26. 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.

Brock Clarke

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

Brock Clarke

#28. 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.

Brock Clarke

#29. They [my eyes] immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes' way of forbidding you to look away,of forcing you to look at the world you've made or unmade.

Brock Clarke

#30. All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs

Brock Clarke

#31. 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.

Brock Clarke

#32. 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.

Brock Clarke

#33. If only my mother had a book to hold, she wouldn't have looked so lonely. And maybe this was another reason why people read: not so they would feel less lonely, but so that other people would think they looked less lonely with a book in their hands and therefore not pity them and leave them alone.

Brock Clarke

#34. Fear and love might leave a man complacent, but jealousy will always get him out of the van.

Brock Clarke

#35. Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.

Brock Clarke

#36. 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.

Brock Clarke

#37. 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.

Brock Clarke

#38. 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.

Brock Clarke

#39. 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.

Brock Clarke

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

Brock Clarke

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

Brock Clarke

#42. Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.

Brock Clarke