Kevin Brockmeier
Kevin Brockmeier
Kevin John Brockmeier is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction. His short stories have been printed in numerous publications and he has published two collections of stories, two children's novels, and two fantasy novels. Brockmeier, who was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, is a graduate of Parkview Arts and Science Magnet High Schooland Southwest Missouri State University. He taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received his MFA in 1997, and lives in Little Rock...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth6 December 1972
CountryUnited States of America
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 that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.
I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.
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 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.
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 me, you don't even realize you've lost them, not until they come back to you.
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.
Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.
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 earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground.
People who read Anne Lamott, like people who read Anne Rice, believe that tragedy is romantic, but the people who read Anne Lamott believe it ironically.
I had always been the kind of boy who was quick to laugh and quick to cry.
With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that’s unlike anyone else’s, creating an atmosphere you don’t so much interpret as breathe.
Worry is a mean-faced dwarf who beats on your heart like a kettledrum.
The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.
I always try to stay as quiet as possible about a book until it's finished.
I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.