Brock Clarke

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party, I passed out for a minute - passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional - and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.”

“For years, my mother must have hated Deirdre; for years she must have wished her dead. And now that Deirdre was dead, my mother looked no different than she had when she thought Deirdre was alive - not guilty, nor relieved, nor happy. How was this possible? How could my mother know Deirdre was dead and still look at the world as if it were the same world, at the fire as if it were the same fire? 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”

“Why wasn't it more difficult? ... Shouldn't some things be difficult?”

“You could have saved her," he said, and I realized that he had started crying, crying being that thing you do when you haven't done enough and you're afraid it's too late to start.”

“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. ”

“... I also empathized, because she'd tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this - the ability to empathize with the people we hate - is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anyone would want to be one.”

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

“When he did that, I didn't hate him anymore, I really didn't, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people that who love them: because it's so easy to stop hating someone if you've already started loving them.”

“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.”

“Apparently, you become yourself to someone when that someone finally learns your secrets.”

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

“And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.”

“...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.”

“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.”

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

“I confess this is an unforeseen -- unforeseen and, indeed, I did not foresee it -- by-product of journaling: in writing down the facts of one's feelings, one might leave out facts, and one might also try to convince oneself that one's fantasy is, in fact, one's fact, or at least a fact among other facts, other facts that are, in fact, facts, making it most difficult to tell the fact from the fantasy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.”

“In truth I was very pleased with myself and with my story and all that had happened in it. Because you can't help being impressed with your own story. Because if you're not impressed with your own story, then who will be?”

“... he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing — or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need, but don't and can't get anyway.”

“There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail — the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions – and so I didn't pay much attention to those letters at all.”

“You can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it's your crowd, you're the only one it's looking for.”

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

“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.”

“When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.”

“I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was "A Fictional Memoir." I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn't make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I think, that love endures, but that it isn't everything, and it isn't ever what we want it to be...”

“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.”

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

“...Maybe this was another reason why people read: not so that 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.”

“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.”

“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”

“Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Can a story actually do anything at all? ”