{"author":"Kevin Brockmeier","author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier","total_quotes":17,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["change","difficulty"],"id":1992,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"[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 book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["brains","filing","loans","ocd","personality","record-keeping","thoughts"],"id":39489,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["death","energy","life","love","persistence","survival"],"id":111830,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["opportunity","solitude","transfiguration"],"id":123081,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["aging","humor","joking","questions","wit"],"id":153940,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"The game had to be played the same way every day or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life, that you were in control, would break.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["change","control","habits"],"id":170071,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["coping","coping-strategies","crying","dreaming","self-control","worrying"],"id":225469,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["chance","illusion","life","misunderstanding","personality"],"id":249562,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["hope","love"],"id":253375,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"},{"text":"The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.","author":"Kevin Brockmeier","tags":["clues","life","self","self-knowledge","understanding"],"id":282890,"author_id":"Kevin+Brockmeier"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}