Brock Clarke Quotes & Sayings

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. — Brock Clarke

When we say we know something in our bones, we mean we don't know yet how we know what we know. This is what we mean by bones. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was "A Fictional Memoir." I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn't make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

I confess this is an unforeseen
unforeseen and, indeed, I did not foresee it
by-product of journaling: in writing down the facts of one's feelings, one might leave out facts, and one might also try to convince oneself that one's fantasy is, in fact, one's fact, or at least a fact among other facts, other facts that are, in fact, facts, making it most difficult to tell the fact from the fantasy. — Brock Clarke

You know what else he said?" Anne Marie asked.
"Tell me," I said. I didn't want to know, of course, but she was going to tell me anyway, so why not invite in the inevitable, which is why, in the movies, vampires have to be asked inside by their victims and always are. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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? — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

There's nothing as quiet as that moment before one person is about to tell another something neither of them wants to hear. — Brock Clarke

Love, love: it was never as pure as you needed it to be. That was the good thing about hate. If you hated someone, really hated him, then you could wish him dead and never once worry that you would change your mind about it. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

Maybe that's the problem with being someplace beautiful: it makes it impossible to live anywhere else that's not. — Brock Clarke

There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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

But maybe this is what happens when you hate someone for so long: the person you hate dies, but the hate stays with you, to keep you company. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

I have no idea,' he said, and that's another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: be wary of a man who says, 'I have no idea,' when asked why his wife doesn't like something he's done, which of course is just another way of saying be wary of men in general. — Brock Clarke

Some of the men were dressed like Peter and wore red plaid hunting jackets or bulky tan Carhartt jackets or lined flannel shirts, and all of those men were wearing jeans and work boots. Some of the men wore ski jackets and hiking boots and the sort of many-pocketed army green pants that made you want to get out of your seat and rappel. Some of the men wore wide-wale corduroy pants and duck boots and cable0knit sweaters and scarves. It was a regular United Nations of white American manhood. But all the men, no matter what they were wearing, were slouching in their chairs, with their legs so wide open that it seemed as though there must be something severely wrong with their testicles. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

I almost touch her on the arm as she touched me on the arm, to console her. But I fear that my touch won't tingle her arm as hers tingled mine, and how unbearably sad that would be. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — 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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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

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. — Brock Clarke

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? — Brock Clarke

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 — Brock Clarke