The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
Kevin Brockmeier
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The only man alive to see it, though, was a wealthy recluse and neurotic, so beset by the embarrassments of society that he had withdrawn from it entirely. For him, every conversation, every transaction, down to the briefest and most businesslike, had become yet another occasion for injury. Those countless social encounters, with their countless tiny cuts--cuts inflicted, cuts received, and the one just as painful to remember as the other. Those smiles preceded by telltale pauses. Those favors both sexual and financial. Those what-do-you-thinks and let-me-borrow-you-for-a-seconds. It had all been too much for him, too freighted with need and misunderstanding....”
“She had always been a person of ticklish sensibilities, easily overcome by the ordinary frictions of life.”
“Sometimes, in the long hours of a summer afternoon, when the paralegals at their desks are seeking a distraction, they watch the ghost emerging from her pleat in space and time and wonder if their lives will slip by like hers did, leaving them fastened so hopelessly, so desperately, to the past. As if a life could work any other way. As if that weren't precisely what a life must do.”
“Time and space, he thought. What a hodgepodge.”
“Their faces are like sunlight on water, a thousand tumbling jacks of white and silver.”
“The guidance counselor had never married; had hardly even dated. It was better, easier, he had decided, not to disturb anyone with his love or his sadness.”
“Tell me what you see vanishing and I Will tell you who you are —W. S. Merwin, “For Now”
“Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.”
“Not long ago he had turned sixty, an age when people hunger for a moment, however small, that will justify the years they have spent and those that still remain to them.”
“From the perspective of the dead, life was a dangerous thing: a world of bullets, with everyone dodging everyone else, and no one to blame but God or the cosmos, contingency or fate, whoever had fired the gun.”
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Book Keywords:
life, rumination, conversations, reality, space, time, interactions, loneliness, ghosts, old-age, time-and-space, personality, love, perceptions, being-alone, death, solitude, partners, fragility, justifications, past, dead, danger, sensibilities, misunderstandings, sixty, society, relationships, dead-people, sadness, fate, aging, identity, history, human-interaction, memory
