Adult Joe Wenteworth Quotes in Simon Birch (1998)

Adult Joe Wenteworth: Time is a monster that cannot be reasoned with. It responds like a snail to our impatience, then it races like a gazelle when you can't catch a breath.

Adult Joe Wenteworth: When someone you love dies, you don't lose them all at once. You lose them in pieces over time, like how the mail stops coming. What I remember most to this day was my mother's scent and how I hated it when it began to disappear. First from her closets, then from her dresses she had sewn herself and then finally from her bedsheets and pillow cases. Simon and I never talked much about that day on the baseball field. It was too painful for both of us. For as much as I loved my mother, I knew that Simon loved her just as much. She was the only real mother he ever had.

Adult Joe Wenteworth: [voiceover] I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice, not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. What faith I have, I owe to Simon Birch, the boy I grew up with in Gravedown, Maine.

Adult Joe Wenteworth: Ben Goodrich legally adopted me just two days before my 13th birthday. Not a day that goes by that I don't thank God for bringing him into my life. With Simon's help, I had finally found my real father.

Miss Leavy: [reading off remaining roles for the Christmas play] ... Well, there's the shepherds, but they don't do much -

[Everyone's hands spring up instantaneously]

Adult Joe Wenteworth: [voicecover] Miss Leavy always tried to downplay the role of the shepherds, but we weren't fooled. We knew that all you had to do was stand there with a staff and try not to laugh at all the poor fools with speaking parts.