Bill Konigsberg Quotes
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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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The world will make you vulnerable. If you’re acting like you’re not, that’s what you’re doing. Acting.
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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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He was an amazing guy, really. Totally himself. Totally unapologetic about having all these different sides of his personality that didn’t quite mesh. He didn’t care what people saw, and at that moment, the envy was so powerful, I wanted to punch him in the face.
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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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There were about a thousand things I liked better than this part, in which we talked about women like they were just things. I tried to imagine what it would be like if gay were normal and all of us were gay. Would we objectify men in the same way?
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More and more these days, I'm realizing that I might be crazy, but I'm loved too. I don't think I ever really knew that before, but I do now.
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When trust is violated, it's like you're left with an empty piggy bank. Building trust again, she said, is like putting big, fat nickels into the slot. They clank against the bottom, and that sound is jarring. But in order to heal, you have to keep adding those nickels, and soon enough, there will be coins to cushion the nickel's fall and make the sound not so grating.
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I worry sometimes that our world actually values a lack of intelligence. Like we are considered normal if we spend our time thinking about what one of the Kardashians wears to a party, and we are considered strange if we wonder whether a bee’s parents grieve if said bee dives into the Central Park Reservoir and never makes it back to the hive.
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We drive, and I'm thinking about users and abusers, like my mom says. The time my dad swung me around by my feet and I got hurt, and how he told me to man up. Who came up with that? Who came up with all those rules and ideas about how a guy's gotta be?
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For dessert, Mom ordered us carob-chip cookies sweetened with fruit juice, which were about as delectable as that sounds. After we finished eating, we made sure to give the waitress all our food and dirty napkins so they could be composted.
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And perhaps the best answer is not to tolerate differences, not even to accept them. But to celebrate them. Maybe then those who are different would feel more loved, and less, well, tolerated.
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And during, I realized that the labels didn’t matter, because when two people feel that sort of pull toward each other, it just works, and the only label that mattered was that I was in love. Totally, fully, ecstatically.
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As I said, it wasn't even a gay thing. But it made me think how hard some kids have it with their families. Me, I could show up as Lady GaGa dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, and Mom would be like, "How was your day, honey?" That's just not the case for most kids.
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He said he was scared they’d lock him up. That’s his biggest fear.
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And I felt so foreign, lying there, the wind howling outside our window. What was I doing here? Who was Rafe, really? Can you just put a part of yourself on hold? And if you do, does it cease to be true? Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight.
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Some things you remember, and some you forget. Of the things you remember, you have to wonder what’s real and what’s translated into a memory from a story you heard.
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Everybody wanted something from me, and some days it felt like I was being pulled in thirty different directions, and I wondered how anyone figured out how to be all things to all people without going insane.
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Having no room of my own to "take care of things" had begun to weigh on me. I wondered if storing up semen would have a health impact on me, positive or negative, like shinier hair or weight gain.
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We hugged, and my dad cried a little. I don't have a macho-type dad, who hunts and fishes and collects guns. He's sensitive and caring. He drives me crazy most of the time, but I do admire that he's not afraid to show his "feminine side.”
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Vulnerability is allowing people to see you exactly as you are, which is really hard, because when you’re vulnerable you can get hurt. Most people armor up with bravado or something, but those people are missing out, because without allowing yourself to be vulnerable, it’s tough to have, like, any emotional experience at all. Letting people in is really vulnerable, and most people—especially introverts—have trouble.
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I think it's okay to just say who you are without it being final or something. I mean, none of us are finished products. We change. We keep changing. We won't be finished products 'til the day we die'.
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It needs to be said that sometimes my mom forgets important details when she talks. Like the time she told us she was considering leather (couches, it turns out), or when I was little and she said, "Here's a napkin to put your balls in" (the Atomic Fireballs that I was eating, she meant).
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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.