("Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe"), "The House in the Cerulean Sea"

[fiefoe]

Sometimes you don't meet a book at the right time. Maybe this one by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (and 99.9% YA books) is like that for me now.

• I came to understand that my father was a careful man. To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.
• I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend."
• But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
• I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.
• I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.
• You can't make anyone be an adult. Especially an adult.
• Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.
• ..and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
• Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.
• Maybe it's a terrible thing, to keep a war to yourself.
• As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.
• I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
• Maybe the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could. That afternoon, I was just a boy. Not even close to being a man.
• Maybe my dad just didn't need words to get by in the world. I wasn't like that. Well, I was like that on the outside, pretending not to need words. But I wasn't like that on the inside.
• I'd figured something out about myself: on the inside, I wasn't like my dad at all. On the inside I was more like Dante. That really scared me.
• “Our parents are really weird,” he said. “Because they love us? That’s not so weird.” “It’s how they love us that’s weird.”
• I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss.
• "From what we cannot hold the stars are made."

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By T.J. Klune. Rather forgettable.

• “You’re too precious to put into words. I think … it’s like one of Theodore’s buttons. If you asked him why he cared about them so, he would tell you it’s because they exist at all.”
• Change often starts with the smallest of whispers. Like-minded people building it up to a roar.
• “But guess what?”
  “What?”
  “There was no treasure after all! It was a lie to get you here for your party!”
  “Oh. I see. So the real treasure was the friendships we made along the way?”
  “You guys are the worst,” Lucy muttered. “The literal worst.”
• “I’ve always wanted to see if humans make good fertilizer. It seems like they would.” She eyed him up and down hungrily. “All that flesh.”
• It was as if the rainclouds had reached as far as they could. The gray darkness gave way to a bright and wonderful blue like Linus had never seen before.
• My line is far older than the rules of man. Just because you decided that all magical beings need to be tagged in the wild for tracking, doesn't give you the right to question me about my legal status.
• (Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird:) Okay okay, I get it. Girls can do everything boys can. Geez.
• Gift giving: it's about the joy that someone's thinking of you.
• How are we supposed to reinforce something that hasn't been changed with the times.
• The Garden Tools Monthly is now the Garden Tools Weekly of the Garden Tools world. It's all about the Garden Tools Bimonthly (now.)
• People suck. But sometimes they should just drown in their own suckage without our help.