41 Quotes by Brock Clarke

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.

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.

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

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

Because this is one of the things I learned from Exley: anything can be a beginning as long as you call it one.

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.

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

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.

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.