Leia’s Reviews > Us Against You > Status Update

“Benji throws them into the same garbage can as all the other notes. Because he doesn’t know which feels worst, the threats or the love. The loathing or the expectations. The hate or the responsibility,” - pg 380

“Benji looks down at the ice and lets out a long sigh. That’s the most dysfunctional compliment he’s ever received. “Can we just play hockey now?” he begs,” -pg 362

“Love and hate. Joy and sorrow. Anger and forgiveness. Sports carry the promise that we can have everything tonight. Only sports can do that” - pg 332

“In many years’ time we might say this was a story about violence. But that won’t be true, at least not entirely. It’s also a love story,” -pg 305

“In Beartown we bury those we love beneath our most beautiful trees. It’s a child who finds the body, but the child doesn’t walk calmly through Beartown the way Adri did when she found her father, Alain Ovich, all those years ago. This child is running,” - 291

‘“People like that probably don’t feel at home in hockey, they probably like other things. You have to bear in mind that hockey’s a tough sport!” Sometimes they said it straight out: “Hockey’s a sport for men!” They said “men,” but even as a small boy Benji would stand alongside in silence, knowing that what they actually meant was “real men.”’-pg 287

“Some will offer complex cultural analysis suggesting that the world of sports, and the hockey world in particular, symbolizes such deeply engrained masculine ideals that the shock is greater there. Others will claim that the reactions were nowhere near as strong as “the media” would like to think. That it’s all been exaggerated,” -pg 276

“Benji’s chin drops, and a knot in his chest tightens. He can see that Leo is awestruck by his ability to hurt other people. Benji doesn’t know who he hates most for that,” - pg 245

“…and back in the spring David saw him kissing another boy. Benji doesn’t know that David knows, and evidently no one else knows either. If David is honest, he can’t help hoping that no one else ever finds out, either. This isn’t the sort of place where he’d wish a revelation of that sort on any hockey player, not even if he’s coming here as an opponent this autumn,” -pg 203

“In ten years’ time, when Amat is playing hockey professionally, he won’t have forgotten this. Some of the guys here will have died of overdoses, others will have died violently, some will be in prison, and some will just have made a mess of their lives. But some will have lives—big, proud lives. And they will all know that here, for just one summer, they were running for something” -pg 118