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, as the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’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, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.

— Kevin Brockmeier

But love doesn't always generate hope. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love 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

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 didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.

— Kevin Brockmeier

For a long time that had seemed to her to be the key to life: Life--real life--was just a solitude waiting to be transfigured. If Phillip was with her, the solitude she needed would be shattered, and along with it whatever wondrous thing might have come her way if she had been alone.

— Kevin Brockmeier

He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an motherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

— Kevin Brockmeier

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

[I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the books whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.

— Kevin Brockmeier

Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut butter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally, protozoically, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcestershire sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tomato juice or movie-theater popcorn. Certain pamphlets and magazines whose paper carried a caustic wafting chemical scent she could taste as she turned the pages. Perfume. Incense. Library books. Long hours of easy conversation. The ability to lick an envelope without worrying that the glue had irritated her mouth. The knowledge that if she heard a song she liked, she could sing along to it in all her dreadful jubilant uselessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse.

— Kevin Brockmeier

Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets.

— Kevin Brockmeier

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