Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Dad read the sports page. My theory was that he kept up with the sports world in order to be able to have a decent conversation with his brothers—that was the way he loved them.
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I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
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Her laugh was as fragile as the leaves she had raked when I was five.
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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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Living is an art, not a science.
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Nothing. It’s just that most smart people are perfect shits.
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What will it be like, to die? What kind of light is there in death? Perhaps there will only be darkness. Perhaps there is nothing but a long, long night. Nothing but a long, long night.
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Have you noticed that some people don't give A damn and just keep on shopping?
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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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You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me.
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And afterward, we played Frisbee with Legs in the park and we were all right. And I needed us to be all right. And he needed us to be all right too. And so we were.
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I guess I didn't have it so bad.Maybe everybody didn't love me,but i wasn't one of those kids that everyone hated,either. I was good in a fight.So people left me alone. i was almost invisible.i think i liked it that way. And then Dante came along.
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If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.
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I closed my eyes. 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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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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That’s the way it was when you loved someone. You took them everywhere you went—whether they were alive or not.
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Turning on the radio and just sitting there was my version of praying.
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And then I just couldn’t stand it anymore, and I took Fito’s fists and I was stronger than he was, and I held his arms and kept him from hitting himself. And then I just pulled him in to me, and I held him and he cried and he cried and he cried. And I couldn’t do anything about all the hurt, but I could hold him.
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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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The whole world seemed to be quiet and calm and I wanted to be the world and feel like that.
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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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And even though rain was a miracle because this was the desert, that night it was not a miracle because the rain sounded like a thief trying to break into the house.
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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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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.