Bill Konigsberg Quotes
-
As soon as I tried to remove the label, a lie formed. In the end, that lie created a barrier way worse than the original one. How crazy is that? Ironic, I mean. I created a barrier getting rid of a barrier.
-
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.”
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
So maybe if I had found all this stuff on my own, I would have really enjoyed learning about it. But instead, I got a pile of books from Mom, and now it was like I had gay homework from my mother. I was like, Thanks for making this exciting new thing a chore, Mom. Awesome.
-
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.
-
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?
-
I think anyone who stops at a gas station at night is up to no good. I think that if cops want to stop drunk driving, they should hide out in the bushes at the Taco Bell drive-through. I think if you're a guy and you pull down your pants and the girl you're with starts texting, you have a small penis.
-
I don't know. I mean, it's not all beautifully harmonic, this world we find ourselves in. Clearly. There's shit music, and sometimes the melody goes away completely. There's silence and dissonant chord that cringe your ears. But the synchronicity of a perfectly created chorus? And the fact that you never know when one is coming? And that amazing feeling, the first time you hear a song and now it's going to be with you forever? I have to think that's worth everything.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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'.
-
I believe in yogurt because it’s creamy and a good use of milk that would otherwise go sour. Think about it: Where does all the sour milk go? That goes for people too. Not that we ferment, though I guess we do lactate, but everyone has skills and desires that go unused and unmet, and they sour. How can we make yogurt of these soured attributes? How do we make something delicious, how do we salvage them? I was like, dude, how in the world did you manage to bring human lactation into your oral report? If I ever said anything half that creative, half that unusual, my best friends would divorce my ass. How can a guy be so comfortable with being weird?
-
I'm so tired of being a type... it's not just a black and white thing. Jock. Geek. Stoner. No one is considered just a human being, it seems like.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
And I think it's thanks to Jordan. I would never have done any of this if I hadn't met him, and if he hadn't showed me how to be real and serious with another guy.
-
Like, did you know that LGBT kids are 8.4 times more likely than straight kids to attempt suicide? And 50 percent of LGBT kids are rejected by their parents? That between 20 and 40 percent of homeless teens say they’re gay, lesbian, or transgender, and that up to 50 percent of the guy teens have sold their bodies to support themselves?
-
I’m just me, and me is confusing.
-
I’d never been part of a group like that, so it was interesting, like a National Geographic special on wolves that I might watch with my dad. And I was part of the pack.
-
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.