Bill Konigsberg Quotes
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What do you call it when a straight person comes out? ... A conversation.
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I shivered. Careful, I told myself. You don't want to set yourself up for a fall. Be happy. Just not too happy.
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I really don’t worry about that anymore. When you’re dying, you don’t have time for that junk. The shit people did to you? It’s over.
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To me, religion is the Walmart of spirituality ... I mean it's prepackaged. Lowest common denominator. People just have to follow the present motions and rituals and rules. The don't have to think about how the words reconcile with their own hearts. Their own experience.
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I tried to imagine myself part of a pack of guys who picked up local public school girls on weekends. It was hard to envision, but I was definitely willing to try. Not the pickup part. Just the being in a posse part.
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Selflessness involves giving up your self. You become a martyr. Like the Hindu kamikaze warriors. These Japanese Hindus chose to give up their lives, and they were killed if they didn't. Imagine what their families felt. One day you have a father, and next, you're watching him fly a plane into a ship on Pearl Harbor on television. Those kids didn't do anything wrong. They just lived in an evil country. The axis of evil. That sort of evil is beyond anything you or I will experience in our lifetimes. So be glad. Be glad we live in the US of A. Be glad we get to choose, with our freedoms. Now get out there and fight!
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He's a good looking guy, no question. All bluster and confidence while I'm whatever the opposite of that is. Apologies and embarrassment. Awkwardness and sorrow. First dead in a zombie apocalypse.
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In the grand scheme of the universe, that doesn't amount to a parasite on an ant on the butt of an elephant.
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The Greeks were smarter than us, and they had different words for different kinds of love. There's storge, which is family love. That's not us. There's eros, which is sexual love. There's philia, which is brotherly love. And then there's the highest form. Agape.” He pronounced it “aga-pay.” “That's transcendental love, like when you place the other person above yourself.
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Do you know how you get the urge to clean your room, and it’s no big deal? But when your mom tells you that you have to clean your room, you don't want to? That's me, anyway.
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I could see he didn’t understand that knowing a person is about more than knowing whom they fantasize about. That’s the small stuff, actually. Not the big stuff. The big stuff is lying next to a guy on the floor and locking eyes and having deep conversations about philosophy. The big stuff is letting a friend know your hopes and your fears and not having to make a joke about it. That’s what matters
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With my white friends, I’m always half Mexican. They never say I’m half Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway from the standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.
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I could see the combinations and permutations flutter through their minds. This was Boulder. It could easily be two moms. Two dads. A dad, a mom, and an orangutan. Three Amish hipsters and a transgendered Aboriginal mermaid.
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I know about urinal etiquette. For one thing, you don’t say anything beyond “What’s up” to another guy while peeing. It’s common courtesy.
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There are so many different kinds of relationships out there, sweetie. The thing that makes one okay and another not is whether it comes from a place of love. Nothing that comes from love could ever be wrong.
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I knew I could have danced if I wanted to, really. But I didn’t, so I didn’t have to. The world needs people who are more comfortable standing still. We keep the earth on its axis when everyone else is bouncing around.
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Straight people don't have to think every time they talk, about whether they are coming out. We do. That might be hard, but that's also why we have to come out. if we don't, it's pretty much impossible to have a conversation about anything beyond the weather without lying. we really have no choice, do we ?
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That’s when I felt it. One thin finger. Gently touching my thigh. I kept talking about how alpha loses two protons and two neutrons, like his finger wasn’t on my thigh. And I think he liked that, because he kept asking questions, as if his finger weren’t on my thigh.
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We were dancers and drummers and standers and jugglers, and there was nothing anyone needed to accept or tolerate. We celebrated.
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That was the thing about Ben. He could get away with saying shit like that. I totally couldn’t. I wasn’t big or masculine enough. In my mind, anyway. But Ben could get all agape on your ass, and you’d just sit there like, huh. Agape. Interesting.
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I decided on a shower, since I smelled like my expiration date had come and gone weeks ago.
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Maybe in life, most of us feel inferior because we compare our dress rehearsals to Janelle Monae’s final performance.
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He was staring into my eyes, and I felt that shivery thing that happens when you look in someone’s eyes and you get goose bumps because you’re gaining access.
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My dad always says this thing, that when you have a foot in tomorrow and a foot in yesterday, you’re pissing all over the present.