The View from the Seventh Layer Quotes

“How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“...When you die, the energy that kept you alive filters into the people you loved. Did you know that? It's like a fire you've tended all your life, and the sparks are all scattered into the wind.... That's why we survive as long as we do, because the people who loved us keep us going.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“There are times in your life when, despite the steel weight of your memories and the sadness that seems to lie at your feet like a shadow, you suddenly and strangely feel perfectly okay.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“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 Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“Sometimes I remember the way I used to be," she said as we sat across the table from each other, "and I'm surprised nobody ever smacked me."
I took a long sip of my coffee so that I would not have to answer her. I wanted to tell her that she ought to be more generous to the girl she used to be, if not out of respect for herself, then out of respect for me, or more specifically for the boy I used to be, who loved that girl, after all.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“She had the same responsibility as everybody else did: to live as softly as she could in the world.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“People who read D.H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire.
More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else.
What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars?
You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“They were like those deep-sea creatures with watery, transparent skin: you could see the soft little jerking beans of their hearts, you understood that the very thing that was supposed to protect them was the thing that made them vulnerable, and you knew you couldn’t help them, so you decided to love them instead.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“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.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“There is no form to this story because it is true, or at least as close to true as I have been able to make it.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady’s yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome’s class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“A consensus slowly gathered among us. We had given up something important, we believed: the fire, the vigor, that came with a lack of ease. We had lost some of the difficulty of our lives, and we wanted it back.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“In some communities there is a man who sells whistles by the courthouse or paper kites down by the river. In others there is a woman who decorates her home with multicolored lights and streamers every holiday. Usually these people are no more than small figures at the periphery of everyone’s attention, but when they die, it can be more surprising than the death of a prominent leader or a renowned artist, because no one has ever regarded them carefully enough to consider what their absence might mean.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“There were moments where I could make her laugh so unselfconsciously that she felt like a child again, expanding into her past as she was moving into her future.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“Sometimes, driving past restaurants that had once been other restaurants, big box stores that had once been wood lots and houses, I imagined that if I could just make the right set of turns, the city would unlock for me, and my car would carry me into the roads of fifteen years ago.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer

“Outside the man who strolls up and down the plaza selling yo-yos stops at a bench to tighten his shoes. He is your city's version of the dandy in the double-breasted suit who roots through the garbage scavenging for recyclables, or the old couple with sombreros and ukuleles who sit in the park singing songs about their sex life — recognized by everybody, the object of a thousand jokes, but so lasting a feature of the landscape that they inspire as much affection as anyone you could mention.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, The View from the Seventh Layer