Last Summer Boys Quotes

“Sometimes, when you know a good thing is over and done and won’t ever come back, everything about it gets a whole lot sweeter. Each little leaf becomes something beautiful. You see the sunlight glowing through it, tracing out all those tiny veins inside. Each blade of grass is suddenly its own living thing, and not just one of a billion others that you stomp over on your way somewhere else. Suddenly it all appears in a way you’ve never seen it before, and it’s so beautiful you wonder what in the world you were looking at in all the time that came before.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Ma says God puts people in your life at different times for different reasons. I know it’s true for dogs too.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Don’t you ever do anything to make somebody feel like their life is no account to you, hear? It’s the worst thing you can do to a person. It’s a kind of killing, a killing of the soul.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Dignity is your value, Jack. It’s something you and every living person have just because you are.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“If you go long enough thinking you don’t have a say in your life, you reach a point where you’ll do anything to show others that you do. And when that time comes, you don’t care what it is. If it’s lighting fires, you light fires.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Dignity is your value, Jack. It’s something you and every living person have just because you are.” “Is that all?” I ask. “Isn’t that enough?” I’m quiet. “That’s plenty,” Dad tells me. “In fact, it’s everything. The dignity of others is how we know some actions are good and others bad. It’s how you know it isn’t right to steal, or to kill without grave reckoning, or to lie.” “You get all that from dignity?” “You do.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“For us Elliots, if the country calls, you answer. Simple as that. Maybe you lose a leg. Maybe you lose much more. But you go. Which is why I hate myself for feeling how I do. Because I don’t want Pete going to Vietnam. I don’t want my brother to die.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“But I think everybody matters. Whether they think so or not. Whether I like them or not. Heck, they matter even if they’ve hurt somebody else, even if they’ve hurt me. People . . . just matter.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“looks”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“the truth blazes like a torch in my mind: I don’t understand any of it. Not why anybody would kill anybody for looking different. Or light fires. Or shoot a policeman. I make for the creek, looking to quench the fire burning in my mind.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Something about the movies lets you forget where you are and go into a whole different world. You just float, and time goes by without you hardly even knowing it. You forget. I forget about the boy and the girl next to us. I forget about Uncle Leone’s shooting and Bobby Kennedy’s killing. I forget about Kemper and his plan to flood our valley. I even forget about the war. Just for a while.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“You’ve always been a fixer, Jack. But sometimes you have to let things go. Let them be. Maybe they get broken. Maybe they don’t. But you don’t have to worry, because nothing stays broken forever. Nothing’s permanently lost.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend—”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“Don’t you ever do anything to make somebody feel like their life is no account to you, hear?”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“God puts people in your life at different times for different reasons. I know it’s true for dogs too.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“swear if you ever grow an idea of your own, it’ll die of loneliness.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys

“When a person feels trampled under, sooner or later, something bad happens.” Ma turns and her eyes find mine, and it seems my shoes are nailed to the floorboards then. “If you go long enough thinking you don’t have a say in your life, you reach a point where you’ll do anything to show others that you do. And when that time comes, you don’t care what it is. If it’s lighting fires, you light fires.”
― Bill Rivers, Last Summer Boys