6 Quotes by Ben Philippe

All children are charming as an adjective, but you’re charming as a verb.

The way his mother loved him was occasionally vexing in how overwhelming it could be. Like the sun or some other celestial body; facing it too directly might kill him.

Yes, we're all overly polite, forage for berries in the summers, and craft simple wooden objects of great beauty around the fire at night.

It occurred to Norris at that moment that Hairy Armpits probably would never give this moment a second thought, whereas, for Norris, it was already congealing into something rock-hard in his chest. It would definitely be one of those repressed high school wounds that only decades of living on a yacht made of nachos would someday come close to healing.

Another thing Norris and Eric had always had in common in a school that catered to mostly white and Catholic families was that dread that at any point their entire existence might get reduced to a single-letter word. N-word. F-word. Norris never judged Eric for wanting to avoid that if he could.

When you were the child of immigrants, you weren't just you; your success was also your parents' your cousins', your relatives' still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.