Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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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 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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I lost myself somewhere. And that’s a very sad thing. Losing yourself is sad and heartbreaking. Fucking sad and fucking heartbreaking. Losing yourself isn’t like losing a key to your house. It isn’t like losing an expensive pair of sunglasses or even the only copy of the greatest screenplay you’ve ever written.
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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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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.
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We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
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I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
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That’s how she loved people—by feeding them.
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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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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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Her laugh was as fragile as the leaves she had raked when I was five.
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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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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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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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Have you noticed that some people don't give A damn and just keep on shopping?
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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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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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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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Turning on the radio and just sitting there was my version of praying.
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If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.
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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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We are all collateral damage for someone's beautiful Ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of the onslaught.
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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.