Owen Benjamin

“I insisted on looking at the solar eclipse myself when told I wasn’t allowed to. Remember what I said about nonsense. Non-sense. They wanted me to not trust my own eyes. I played Beethoven in music class and made the poor teacher feel like I was insulting her lesson. I thought she would be impressed. I thought I would earn her respect.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“The head of the school board and all the Catholic churches was a little monster named Monsignor Fafaro. He was known for a very public young-boy sex abuse scandal with a horrifying number of victims. Despite mountains of evidence and testimony, he not only kept his job, but much of the town was devoted to him and even defended the fact that he was living with a nineteen-year-old when he was in his seventies, on church property. He was responsible for hiring all the priests and the teachers in Oswego. So with him and his friends on a half-century abuse spree, there was a strong sense of multigenerational anger toward anyone acting remotely, quote unquote, gay. It might well have been as a coping mechanism for what many of them had endured as children.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard