82 Quotes by Bill Konigsberg

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.

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.

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.

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.

Guilt is about something you do. Shame is about who you are.

You can be anything you want, but when you go against who you are inside, it doesn’t feel good.

But I do think that when we choose the easy path, where people or society reward us for being what they want us to be, against who we really are, a kind of death occurs. To the soul.

The world needs people who are more comfortable standing still. We keep the earth on it axis when everybody else is bouncing around.

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. The.