The Illumination Quotes

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“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 tunelessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“At first he was sure he had died. When the one with the shaved head gave him another blow to the midriff and his stomach erupted with four long shears of light, he believed he was watching his soul flee from his body. He had never been certain he had a soul, but there it went, like a flock of birds flooding through an open gate. Out it poured from the gash on his arm. Out it poured from the puncture on his thigh. Out it poured from that frog’s neck of tissue between his thumb and his forefinger, where the one with the ski jacket had nicked him with a paring knife and forced him to splay his hand open until the skin split to the muscle. So much light. What else could it have been?”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“But ultimately, to his surprise, evangelism was a job like so many others, where it did not matter what you believed, only what you did. A good thing, since he had never been exactly sure what he believed. He believed in holding on. He believed in keeping up. He believed in causing as little trouble as possible, which meant, he supposed, that he believed in squeaking by. He believed in English Breakfast tea and egg-white omelettes. He believed in pocket watches and comfortable shoes. He believed in going to bed at a reasonable hour. He believed in exercising three times a week. He believed there was a mystery at the center of the great big why-is-there-anything called the universe, and that it did not speak to us, or not in any language we could understand, and that it was an insult to the mystery to pretend that it did.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“She was a Christian by constitution, whereas Ryan was merely a Christian by inertia. Or he very nearly was, he would have been, if not for the occasional moment waiting at a stoplight or pushing a shopping cart whit a floating front wheel through the supermarket when, despite the fact that everyone was in pain and everyone was dying and no one knew what they were or where they came from, an inexplicable sense that it would all be okay washed over him like a wave. It was the same feeling that Wittgenstein had found so curious, that one that had convinced him of the existence of God. A hint, a clue. Not a burning bush or a disembodied hand marking out letters in plaster, but the slight breeze He left as He brushed past the world.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination

“He believed there was a mystery at the center of the great big why-is-there-anything called the universe, and that it did not speak to us, or not in any language we could understand, and that it was an insult to the mystery to pretend that it did.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination