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.
Kevin BrockmeierShe had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.
Kevin BrockmeierI'm uncommonly slow to show my work to other people, and by the time I do I've usually exhausted myself so completely that all I really want is for someone to tell me that my efforts have added up to something - not one of my better qualities, I admit.
Kevin BrockmeierA 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 itโs 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, youโll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place.
Kevin Brockmeier