Randy Gissel

“Joey was quiet, but finally he said, “This is going to sound really weird . . .”
 
Alice encouraged him by saying, “I love weird.”
 
Joey went on, feeling a little better. “One day when I was in the woods by the stream, I heard a voice . . .,” and the whole story tumbled out.”
― Ellen J. Lewinberg, Joey and His Friend Water

“In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life. And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years. At the top of one page we have left a lover full of hope; at the foot of the next we meet him again, a bowed old man of eighty, painfully dragging himself on his daily walk about the courtyard of an almshouse, scarcely replying to what is said to him, oblivious of the past.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“I will read long books and the journals of dead writers. I will feel closer to them than I ever felt to people I used to know before I withdrew from the world. It will be sweet and cool this friendship of mine with dead poets, for I won’t have to touch them or answer their questions. They will talk to me and not expect me to answer. And I’ll get sleepy listening to their voices explaining the mysteries to me. I’ll fall asleep with the book still in my fingers, and it will rain.”
― Tennessee Williams, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

“My mind is filled with one thought and it runs through over and over and over.”
― James Frey, A Million Little Pieces