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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum. — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
“If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
“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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share
“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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share
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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share
What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
“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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share
You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
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… — Kevin Brockmeier Copy Share Image
