A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip Quotes

“He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“[I]f he had to guess, he would say that the reason he doesn't want to loan the book out, to Ethan or anyone else, is because of the part of his personality that is one gigantic record-keeping system, a complex sifting and filing scheme that dictates what goes here and what goes there, turning his life into so many marks on a tablet. His mind would busy itself with the book's whereabouts every second it was away. He knows it would.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“You never really know. Lately Kevin has been bothering himself with the idea that nothing is certain, nothing can be proven. Not one thing, not in all the world. The sun will rise tomorrow. Prove it. The sun rose this morning. Prove it. The sun is in the sky. Prove it. There's a sun at all. Prove it. The world is like a box of Kleenex, every doubt pulling another along behind it. You can always find a new reason to distrust the facts.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young. —Italo Calvino”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“He feels the way he used to feel passing love notes to girls in elementary school. Do you like me? the notes always read. Check yes or no. But he is older now and his question is older, too, not Do you like me? but Shouldn’t someone?”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

“The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself--he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice.”
― Kevin Brockmeier, A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade