Brock Clarke Quotes

I guess you don't know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one.

I didn't normally talk this way: but sometimes you have to pretend to be an innocent child to learn something about the complicated world of adults.

Some of the books I'd read had told me that love is fleeting; some of the other books I'd read had told me that love is eternal. But they were wrong. Love isn't either of those things. Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.

When he did that, I didn't hate him anymore, I really didn't, and maybe this is why people do so many hateful things to the people that who love them: because it's so easy to stop hating someone if you've already started loving them.

And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.

Good-bye,' I said to them, but they didn't seem to hear me, and why would they have wanted to? Why would they have wanted to do with the world outside of each other? Outside each other, they were mean little human beings like the rest of us, the kind of people you both loathed and pitied. Separately, they were characters, and not in a good way. But together they were something to wonder at and maybe even envy. I had this unoriginal thought as I walked out the door and toward my van: love changes us, makes us into people whom others then want to love. That's why, to those of us without it, love is the voice asking, What else? What else? And to those of us who have had love and lost it or thrown it away, then love is the voice that leads us back to love, to see if it might still be ours or if we've lost it, love is also the thing that makes us speak in aphorisms about love, which is why we try to get love back, so we can stop speaking that way. Aphoristically, that is.

That was his phrase - "the high ramparts of my defensiveness"- and I remembered it in case I ever decide to build and then describe my own ramparts.

This helping-people business was an attractive idea, I'll admit, because up to now I'd not done much more than be, and when I wasn't just being, I'd caused some pain, too.

How did he get so terribly smart, so determined? Maybe it was the pain I'd caused that made him that way, and if that were true, then I'd sort of had a hand in it, in making him as smart and devious as he was. I was really starting to dislike the guy. But I also felt a little proud, like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his monster turned on him, because after all, it was Dr. Frankenstein who had made the monster strong and cunning enough to turn on him.

After a dream like that, you're grateful that it was just a dream, that no matter how bad your actual life, it couldn't be worse than your dream life.

Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.

About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party, I passed out for a minute - passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional - and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.

Can a story be good only if it produces an effect? If the effect is a bad one, but intended, has the story done its job? Is it then a good story? If the story produces an effect other than the intended one, is it then a bad story? Can a story be said to produce an effect at all? Can a story actually do anything at all?

They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love.

This was yet another good thing about drinking, of course: not that drinking made you forget things, but that it made it possible for you to plausibly pretend you'd forgotten things.

Because this is another thing your average American man in crisis does: he tries to go home, forgetting, momentarily, that he is the reason he left home in the first place, that the home is not his anymore, and that the crisis is him.

They [my eyes] immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes' way of forbidding you to look away,of forcing you to look at the world you've made or unmade.

And then he looks at me in that way of his, that way that suggests you aren't exactly a human being, but rather a possible cog, a potential working part of one of his mysterious ideas.

Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you've done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven't done.

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.

Oh no," I said, because if our life is just one endless song about hope and regret, then "oh no" is apparently that song's chorus, the words we always return to.

A tricky bit of business, this believing in someone else. So tricky that we would never do it, if we did not want someone, someday, to believe in us, too.

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

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

But then again, I was pretty certain I'd make more mistakes, so I didn't dwell on the one I'd just made too long. This is another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: if you make a mistake, don't dwell on it too long, because you'll make more of them.

I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral.

Apparently, you become yourself to someone when that someone finally learns your secrets.

All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs

I bet it was also the triumphant Aha! and not the truth itself that had fueled all those famous literary detectives I knew not much about except their names - Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Joe and Frank Hardy. I felt like yelling something celebratory on my way home, something like, Yeah! or Fuck, yeah! just like Marlowe would have yelled, just like the Hardys would have yelled, and maybe Holmes, too, although maybe that's why he kept Watson around; to tell Holmes to simmer down and not get too far ahead of himself.

Why wasn't it more difficult? ... Shouldn't some things be difficult?

Because we both knew that sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.

There is always someone smarter than you; you'd think we die from the constant pain of our mental inferiority, except that most of the time we're too stupid to feel it.

And I also know that this is why love allows us to be so cruel to the beloved: so that the beloved doesn't make the mistake of loving us again or loving us for the first time.

It was a complicated look. I remember thinking that, and I also remember thinking that you had to have known someone for a really long time to be able to look at him like that, and he had to have known you for a really long time to be able to understand it.

You can wait only so long for a blackened window to be illuminated.

Detail exists not only to make us remember the things we don't want to, but to remind us that there are some things we don't deserve to forget.

I had what, I wanted, it was with me, in the room, including the room itself. Was it possible that we hear that voice not when we want something else but when we're in danger of losing the things we already have?

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.

I took notes as they divided the world between those who had stuff taken away from them, and those who took, those who did bad things in a good way- gracefully, effortlessly- and those bumblers who bumbled their way through life.