Quotes from The Brief History of the Dead

“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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from 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, quote from The Brief History of the Dead

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Popular quotes

“Now we will live!” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.”
― Timothy Snyder, quote from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“La misantropia nasce dal riporre eccessiva fiducia in qualcuno senza una conoscenza tecnica, dal ritenere un uomo completamente veritiero, sano e affidabile, e dallo scoprire dopo poco tempo che è cattivo e inaffidabile, e così ancora con altri. E quando uno soffra molte volte per questa stessa esperienza, e soprattutto da parte di quelli che considera più vicini e più amici, allora, per i ripetuti colpi, finisce per odiare tutti e per ritenere che non ci sia niente di sincero in nessuno. Non ti sei accorto che è così che succede?".
"Certo" risposi.
"E questo - disse - non è brutto? e non è chiaro che chi agisce così cerca di trattare le persone senza una conoscenza specifica delle cose umane? Se infatti agisse con questa conoscenza, li giudicherebbe così come sono, alcuni estremamente buoni o cattivi, e la maggioranza mediocremente buona o cattiva".”
― Plato, quote from Phaedo

“Whether he loved her or not didn't change how she felt about him. She loved him independent and regardless of whether he loved her.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from Ice

“Udell was an ordinary man, I thought, but a man with an extraordinary way of thinking. That was truly worth more than gold: extraordinary thinking.”
― Nancy E. Turner, quote from The Star Garden

“لا بد من تعلّم أن يكون الإنسان رفيقًا طيبًا لنفسه.”
― Gioconda Belli, quote from The Inhabited Woman

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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