Ali Benjamin Quotes

There's no single right way to say goodbye to someone you love. But the most important thing is that you keep some part of them inside you.

In the end Suzanne, it's a gift to spend time with people we care about. Even if it's imperfect. Even if that time doesn't end when, or how, we expected. Even when that person leaves us.

That's what science is," she explained. "It's learning what others have discovered about the world, and then - when you bump up against a question that no one has ever answered before - figuring out how to get the answer you need.

If people were silent, they could hear the noise of their own lives better. If people were silent, it would make what they did say, whenever they chose to say it, more important. If people were silent, they could read one another's signals, the way underwater creatures flash lights at one another, or turn their skin different colors.

Who knows. Maybe everybody's end isn't the day they actually die, but the last time anyone speaks of them. Maybe when you die you don't really disappear, but you fade into a shadow, dark and featureless, only your outlines visible.

It's peculiar how no-words can be better than words. Silence can say more than noise, in the same way that a person's absence can occupy even more space than their presence did.

A person can become invisible simply by staying quiet.

All the creatures on this earth might be made from stardust.
But we are the only ones who get to know that. That's the thing about jellyfish: They'll never understand that. All they can do is drift along, unaware.

It was exactly one month since the Worst Thing had happened, and almost as long since I'd started not-talking. Which isn't refusing to talk, like everyone thinks it is. It's just deciding not to fill the world with words if you don't have to. It is the opposite of constant-talking, which is what I used to do, and it's better than small talk, which is what people wished I did.

Sometimes you want things to change so badly, you can't even stand to be in the same room with the way things actually are.

The more fragile the animal, the more it needs to protect itself. So the more venom a creature has, the more we should be able to forgive that animal. They're the ones that need it most. And, really, what is more fragile than a jellyfish, which doesn't even have any bones?

A jellyfish, if you watch it long enough, begins to look like a heart beating. It doesn't matter what kind: the blooded Atolla with its flashing siren lights, the frilly flower hat variety, or the near-transparent moon jelly, Aurelia aurita. It's their pulse, the way they contract swiftly, than release. Like a ghost heart-- a heart you can see right through, right into some other world where everything you ever lost as gone to hide.
Jellyfish don't even have hearts, of course-- no heart, no brain, no bone, no blood. But watch them for a while. You will see them beating.

MAYBE EVERYBODY'S END isn't the day they actually die, but the last time anyone speaks of them.

There are worse misdeeds than those that are done for a higher purpose.

I'd always thought that being seen was about what people perceived with their eyes. But by the time the Eugene Field Memorial Middle School made the fall trip to the aquarium, I, Suzy Swanson, had disappeared entirely. Being seen is more about the ears than the eyes, it turns out.

These things made me feel like I could stand in one place my whole life and never run out of new things to discover. I liked that so many things were out there, waiting to be known.

this is real, and it is happening now, just as it happened before: We are under the big tree in my backyard, on that patch of dirt where we used to build fairy houses from moss and sticks and scraps of birch. It is late afternoon. All around us is golden light. We have been together all day, in our cutoff shorts and bare feet. It is the start of fifth grade, the start of being the oldest in the school. Next year, we will be the youngest all over again. But not yet. We are playing that hand-slapping game, the one we like to play at recess. You hold your hands out, palms up, and I place mine lightly on top. You pull yours out and try to slap mine. You hit air three times. On the fourth try, your

There is at least one species of jellyfish that can grow younger, which is something that pretty much no creature on Earth can do. Don't believe me? Look it up. Turritopsis dohrinii. The immortal jellyfish.
When it's threatened, Turritopsis dohrinii can return from its adult medusa stage, the stage where a jellyfish looks like a jellyfish, all the way back into a younger stage, where it clings to the bottom of the ocean floor for safety. Theoretically, it can do this indefinitely: grow old, then young, old, then young, and never really die.
It would be as if, when everything started going wrong, when it started getting stressful, we could have just gone backward. Imagine that. Imagine if we could have said, "Oops, this is too hard," and shrunk in size, returned to a place of being just kids, the way we always had been.
And we could just stay there, tethered safely, forever.

Maybe this is what happens when a person grows up. Maybe the space between you and the other people in your life grows so big you can stuff it full of all kinds of lies.

I'm sorry I made your time on this rock, this stupid little mote of dust, harder and not easier.

Being seen is more about the ears than the eyes