Kevin Brockmeier famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Memories #Lying #Sadness
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

#Thinking #One Day #Way
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

#Love Is #Water #Too Much
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

#Believe #People #Tragedy
With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone thatâ€™s unlike anyone elseâ€™s, creating an atmosphere you donâ€™t so much interpret as breathe.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Writing #Creating #Atmosphere
Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Heart #Mean #Dwarves
The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Long #Pearls #Remember
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 didnâ€™t keep a hard eye on herself.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Life #Dream #Eye
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
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.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Blessing #Realizing #Like You
She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Responsibility #World
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 at the far bend of a highway.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Opportunity #Water #Personality
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

#Simple #Years #Soul
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.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Stars #Pain #Joy
...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

#Wind #Fire #Long
There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Alive #World #Mystery
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.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Virginia #Vices #Forget
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 itâ€™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, youâ€™ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Song #Fall #Sleep
I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.
-- Kevin Brockmeier

#Gratitude #Book #Writing

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