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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One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
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But there she was, sobbing for Yolie, and he wondered why some people stayed soft no matter what happened to them.
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I do not know what it means to be okay. I have never known and maybe I will never know. Okay is just a word I use so I won't have to talk about what's inside. Okay is a word that means I am going to keep my secrets.
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Words were not things you could control. Not always.
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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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That was the first time that I really saw my mother as a person. A person who was so much more than just my mother. It was strange to think of her that way.
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What did school matter compared to a sister?
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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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Her fading voice was the one I heard the loudest.
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I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.
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I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
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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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I keep that memory somewhere inside me—where it’s safe. I take it out and look at it when I need to. As if it were a photograph.
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Some day we’ll all be happy. I promise you. And there won’t be any more fighting.
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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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I’ll leave a note to the rector of the cathedral and remind him that a woman gave him birth. Something for him to think about the next time he gives one of his sermons. I’m writing all this down.
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My mother watched me. It was true. I had never loved her more.
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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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If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.
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In one war, there are a thousand wars within that war--each one private, singular, inaccessible, a fragment, a piece of a larger whole, parallel yet forever separate. And all we do in life is struggle with our impoverished efforts to put our war into words. I don't believe most of us ever succeed in our translations. It's an art most of us never conquer. That's why we argue with one another. We're like countries--each of us clinging to our separate histories. We're fighting one another about our translations, about what really happened. Which is another kind of war.
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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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When I hung up the phone, I felt a little sad. And a little happy. For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.