Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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If you want to be alive, you can’t avoid pain.
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I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.
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I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
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He looked tired but at that moment, as we sat at the kitchen table, there was something young about him. And I thought that maybe he was changing into someone else. Everyone was always becoming someone else.
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Maggie was scratching at the door. I let her in. And then I thought that maybe life was like that—there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
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Even though summers were mostly made of sun and heat, summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone. Did all boys feel alone? The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
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One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.
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The world was so silent. There was a barrier between me and the world, and I thought for a moment that the world had never wanted me and now it was taking the opportunity to get rid of me.
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I loved her for her silence. Or maybe I just understood it. And loved my father too, for the careful way he spoke. 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.
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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.
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All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.
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And then everyone in the room started laughing. My dad and my uncles and aunts - if there's one thing they knew how to do, it was laugh. My dad called that sort of behaviour whistling in the dark. Well, I guess that when you found yourself in the dark, you might as well whistle. It wasn't always going to be morning , and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn't whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up.
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She was hard as stone. And I hated her. I think I still hate her. Though in between then and now, I loved her. I would have done anything for her. And I did. I did everything she asked.
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I guess that was going to be my new thing. I couldn't exactly storm away in anger. I'd just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.
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But he didn’t know exactly where the worry was coming from. He just had a feeling. Like thunder in the sky. Only the thunder was in his stomach. There would be a storm.
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On the outside, he was back to his old self. Only, I knew there was a wound living inside him, and that wound wasn’t going away anytime soon.
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And then Fito sort of hung his head and he was blinking his eyes, like he was trying to blink away all the tears that he’d held inside all his life.
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They trampled the world with their sick and twisted and crooked kind of love. The bastard didn’t think that anyone else’s love mattered at all. As if a father’s love knew everything, could see everything, could cure everything. And what would have happened if that man, Robert Lawson, had been allowed to keep his son? What would have fucking happened then? Men like him and Mando, they didn’t understand anything but their own imperfect hearts. That was their sickness—that they believed themselves to be the center of all light. That kind of light was a darkness of the land. A plague that was killing them all.
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I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn't like feeling like that.
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A country will never love you like a woman.
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I fell in love with the thunder.
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Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing to be the son of a man who’s been to war.
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She was a counselor, a therapist, a beautiful woman. He was nothing. That’s what he was.
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I closed my eyes and let the water rush over me and I wondered what it would be like to be as soft as water, to make people clean, to quench people's thirst. That would be a beautiful thing, to be like water.