57 Quotes by Kevin Brockmeier

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.