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1d8ac08
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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..
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personality
illusion
life
misunderstanding
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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8057660
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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.
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fate
life
predetermination
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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a218512
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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.
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persistence
life
love
energy
survival
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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a1a93c6
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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73c13e6
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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.
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coping-strategies
dreaming
worrying
crying
self-control
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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df24836
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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6c98896
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You remember having friends who used to lampoon the world so effortlessly, crouching at the verge of every joke and waiting to pounce on it, and you remember how they changed as they grew older and the joy of questioning everything slowly became transformed into the pain of questioning everything, like a star consuming its own core.
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humor
joking
questions
wit
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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e520d39
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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52758a4
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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.
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life
rube-goldberg
soul
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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536b46d
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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f78ddf7
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There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.
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world
people
wonder
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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5f5053f
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The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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b53f13f
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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6e39cee
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But love doesn't always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love 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.
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love
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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c1d8a29
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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765e97c
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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.
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future-past
future-plans
future-present
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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bbc6544
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She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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202f0f5
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Sometimes I remember the way I used to be," she said as we sat across the table from each other, "and I'm surprised nobody ever smacked me." I took a long sip of my coffee so that I would not have to answer her. I wanted to tell her that she ought to be more generous to the girl she used to be, if not out of respect for herself, then out of respect for me, or more specifically for the boy I used to be, who loved that girl, after all."
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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8146a8c
|
Man African societies divide humans into 3 categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ..
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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d13e261
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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.
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difficulty
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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5cb30d8
|
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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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910c0c4
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Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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4b18cf4
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Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut butter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally, protozoically, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcestershire sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tom..
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pain
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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9b39607
|
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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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65615b8
|
They were like those deep-sea creatures with watery, transparent skin: you could see the soft little jerking beans of their hearts, you understood that the very thing that was supposed to protect them was the thing that made them vulnerable, and you knew you couldn't help them, so you decided to love them instead.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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a0122f5
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From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire. More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else. What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars? You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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2ab1b15
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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.
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life
daydreams
laughing
crying
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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aca7ba7
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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368d0e6
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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.
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habits
control
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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e4ed1fe
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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ff30db6
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She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something-for finally getting to know him. She that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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9f58102
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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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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caa692e
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The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady's yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film..
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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f7b8f22
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But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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2a8131b
|
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. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.
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solitude
transfiguration
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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2fb9c6d
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My son was something of a disciple of flying things. On his bedroom wall were posters of fighter planes and wild birds. A model of a helicopter was chandeliered to his ceiling. His birthday cake, which sat before me on the picnic table, was decorated with a picture of a rocket ship - a silver-white missile with discharging thrusters. I had been hoping that the baker would place a few stars in the frosting as well (the cake in the catalog wa..
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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b1cd4f4
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The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black verticle stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the verticle stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the sto..
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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946a452
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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.
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god-s-grace
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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423514d
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Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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c85243d
|
I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.
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personality
thoughts
loans
record-keeping
filing
ocd
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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a03e4b5
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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.
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jokes
peculiarity
strangeness
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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579e132
|
Lately Kevin has been bothering himself with the idea that nothing is certain, nothing can be proven. Not one thing, not in all the world. The sun will rise tomorrow. The sun rose this morning. The sun is in the sky. There's a sun at all. The world is like a box of Kleenex, every doubt pulling another along behind it. You can always find a new reason to distrust the facts.
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doubt
certainty
proof
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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e72b120
|
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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |
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60b0111
|
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.
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Kevin Brockmeier |