The Brief History of the Dead Quotes

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much 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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“I stopped and asked him if he was all right, and he said he was tired of remembering everything he wanted to forget and forgetting everything he wanted to remember.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only so long as they remember us.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Man African societies divide humans into 3 categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many...can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Was that what it meant to be alive - moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step? Sometimes it felt that way.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“The people were created in the image of God and thus they were within the precinct of His grace, even the ones who didn't know Him...the ones who withdrew themselves from His presence.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“But why did he remember only the things in life that had hurt him? Why couldn't he remember the things that had given him joy or caused him to smile: the jokes he had heard, the songs that had made him lift his arms in the air, the people who had loved him, whose cheeks he had touched with his fingers?”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“The incident made her remember the story she had heard about the girl who was raised in a room with no horizontal lines. She couldn't recall whether the story was true or simply a thought experiment, but the room, as she remembered it, was decorated with a series of black verticle stripes on the walls, and the floor and ceiling were curved to give the illusion that the verticle stripes were continuous. On the child's first birthday, the story went, she was taken out of the room. She had learned how to recognize verticle forms, but not horizontal ones, so that if she was situated on a table, say, or a platform, she would crawl right off the edge, but she would never run into the corner of a wall or the leg of a chair. Her condition lasted for about a month before her visual sense finally corrected itself.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“She felt for a moment the child's guilt and panic that she was to blame for something-for finally getting to know him. She that it wasn't the getting to know him part that would convict her in the end. It was the finally.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“People say they want to die in their own home. But me, I was ready for the hospital. The sterilized sheets, the machines, the whole bit. It just seemed easier there. Easier to cast myself off, I mean.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Was that what it meant to be alive—moving from a brightly lit corridor into a darkened room at every step?”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Most people seemed to think that you fell asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse — you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many . . . can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“The living carry us inside them like pearls. We survive only as long as they remember us.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead

“Luka had been the Adam to her Eve, the Friday to her Robinson Crusoe, the Master to her Margarita. None of them were stories that left room for anyone else.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The Brief History of the Dead