Exley Quotes

“Some people, when desperate, retreat to pills or hard liquor. I nap.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“Apparently, you become yourself to someone when that someone finally learns your secrets.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“And I thought that maybe this was what it means to get old: to have someone much younger remind you of how you weren't the same person you used to be.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“Because this is one of the things I learned from Exley: anything can be a beginning as long as you call it one.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“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, Exley

“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, Exley

“Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

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

“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, Exley

“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, Exley

“Maybe that's the problem with being someplace beautiful: it makes it impossible to live anywhere else that's not.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“...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, Exley

“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, Exley

“I guess you don't know what kind of guy you are until you start acting like one.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“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, Exley

“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, Exley

“Love is not wanting the thing you love to ever end. I was in love with A Fan’s Notes, just like my dad was. And I was in love with my dad, just like I was in love with A Fan’s Notes. I wanted both of them to last forever.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“I was so mad at her, and I didn’t know what to say. Apparently, when you’re mad at someone and you don’t know what to say, you say something you don’t mean and you hope you’re not made to regret it. “If I go home,” I said, “I’m not coming back.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“Because when you say you miss someone, you also mean you miss the way you were before you started missing someone.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“M.’s mother doesn’t reply. She just looks at me with her deep, deep black eyes. M. has described to me these eyes and their effect. I believe that M.’s mother respects me for standing my professional ground. I also believe that I will end up being a private detective, if that’s what M.’s mother really wants me to be.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“It was like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a man sitting on your floor and asking him who he is, what he’s doing there, and he doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t answer, until you gradually realize he doesn’t answer because he’s a pile of dirty clothes that you were supposed to put in the hamper, and you end up being relieved and then disappointed. The man pushing the vacuum cleaner turned it on when he got to within a foot of me. It whined.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley

“It was the most depressing room I’d ever been in: more depressing than whatever room my parents happened to be arguing in, more depressing than my dad’s hospital room, more depressing than my room right before I was made to clean it. Beyond the desk and to the left, I could see a hallway, also dark, and a series of doors on either side of it. It was the kind of hallway you see in nightmares.”
― Brock Clarke, Exley