Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
There were so many ghosts in our house - the ghost of my brother, the ghost of my father's war, the ghost of my sister's voices. And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn't even met yet. They werer there. Lying in wait.
-
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
-
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.
-
Her laugh was as fragile as the leaves she had raked when I was five.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing. It’s just that most smart people are perfect shits.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Have you noticed that some people don't give A damn and just keep on shopping?
-
That’s the way it was when you loved someone. You took them everywhere you went—whether they were alive or not.
-
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.
-
The whole world seemed to be quiet and calm and I wanted to be the world and feel like that.
-
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.
-
We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.