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

Categorized in : Thinking Opposites Confusion

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

sadness memories lying

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.

Kevin Brockmeier

way-forward one-day thinking

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.

Kevin Brockmeier

littles love-is water

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

Kevin Brockmeier

kind laughing boys

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

Kevin Brockmeier

pearls remember long

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

Kevin Brockmeier

responsibility world

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

soul simple years

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

Kevin Brockmeier

trying quiet book

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

tragedy believe people

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

Kevin Brockmeier

gratitude writing book

...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

fire wind long

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

Kevin Brockmeier

sea love-is book

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

Kevin Brockmeier

mystery alive world

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

Kevin Brockmeier

dwarves heart mean

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

atmosphere creating writing

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

Kevin Brockmeier

ready good-things believe

You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground.

Kevin Brockmeier

rocks wind people

A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

Kevin Brockmeier

eye song fall

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

knowing rose joy

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

eye dream life