Kevin Brockmeier Quotes

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

Kevin Brockmeier

#2. I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry.

Kevin Brockmeier

#3. There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.

Kevin Brockmeier

#4. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#5. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#6. Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets.

Kevin Brockmeier

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

Kevin Brockmeier

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

Kevin Brockmeier

#9. 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?

Kevin Brockmeier

#10. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#11. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#12. Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.

Kevin Brockmeier

#13. I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.

Kevin Brockmeier

#14. It's like you're born with all these blessings, only you don't realize they're blessings until you lose them. And if you're thick-headed enough, like me, you don't even realize you've lost them, not until they come back to you.

Kevin Brockmeier

#15. I was wholly invested in my friendships. I might have tested them sometimes, but only to reassure myself that they were permanent. A mistake, of course.

Kevin Brockmeier

#16. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#17. You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.

Kevin Brockmeier

#18. What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.

Kevin Brockmeier

#19. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#20. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#21. I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished.

Kevin Brockmeier

#22. If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

Kevin Brockmeier

#23. Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young. - Italo Calvino

Kevin Brockmeier

#24. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#25. I think you're confusing God with a genie.

Kevin Brockmeier

#26. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#27. Was that what it meant to be alive - moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes it felt that way.

Kevin Brockmeier

#28. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#29. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

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

Kevin Brockmeier

#31. I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite - to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.

Kevin Brockmeier

#32. In seventh grade I gradually became aware that that quickness of feeling was something I was supposed to have outgrown. I was rather guileless, I think, or at least I was when it came to the people I cared about.

Kevin Brockmeier

#33. Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

Kevin Brockmeier

#34. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#35. He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

Kevin Brockmeier

#36. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

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

Kevin Brockmeier

#38. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#39. People who read D.H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same.

Kevin Brockmeier

#40. With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that's unlike anyone else's, creating an atmosphere you don't so much interpret as breathe.

Kevin Brockmeier

#41. 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.

Kevin Brockmeier

#42. She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.

Kevin Brockmeier

#43. I'm uncommonly slow to show my work to other people, and by the time I do I've usually exhausted myself so completely that all I really want is for someone to tell me that my efforts have added up to something - not one of my better qualities, I admit.

Kevin Brockmeier

#44. I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

Kevin Brockmeier

#45. I suppose that when you're growing up, you're bound to reach an age when you feel buffeted by all the changes in your life, when either your mind begins outpacing your body or your body begins outpacing your mind and you're not quite in conversation with yourself anymore.

Kevin Brockmeier