Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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In transition? What kind of a Mexican mother are you? I’m an educated woman. That doesn’t un-Mexicanize me, Ari.
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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.
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And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the "f" word wasn't a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free.
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But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.
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There is a randomness to this ballet of death. This is the order of things. This is the secret to understanding the universe. Everything happens in an instant. Normalcy. And then apocalypse.
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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.
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I watched her hands as they worked the batter over with a wooden spoon. I wanted to kiss them.
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I watched her from the doorway. I wondered how it was that she came to be the owner of that rage. I wanted it for myself but there was nothing in me.
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Just because I'm playing on the other team doesn't mean I'm this pathetic human being who's begging to be loved.
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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. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.
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I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
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It was as if all the scenes of my life were running through my brain like a pack of dogs running through the streets, dogs running and running, unable to stop even though they were tired.
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Dogs were lucky—they didn’t need to live forever. They weren’t as greedy as people.
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It didn’t matter that he’d never see her again because she was safe, and she didn’t have to live this kind of life. Her life would be good. She was safe.
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Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can't pretend it isn't there.
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See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else - sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you're not making someone bleed.
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for —W. S. Merwin
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All right, so we’re also all fucked up. But hey, you think sober people aren’t all fucked up? The world is being run by sober people—and it doesn’t look like it’s working out all that well.
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Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it!” I knew I was starting to cry and I was so sick, sick, sick to death of all those sad damned tears I had inside me. How could I have so many tears living there, in my body? How could they fit? When was it going to stop? When?
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Even in his damaged state, he could light up a room. He could fill it with a presence that was large and rare.
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I knew that even though he was way into mood-altering substances and he had this really bad temper that there was something really beautiful inside him. Just because no one else could see it didn't mean it wasn't there.
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About a boy who had a beautiful heart, and how that boy could make plants grow and how he could make people say good things—even people who liked to say only bad things.
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Mom had told me about that—she called it a dangerous light. It’s beautiful to look at, but it blinds people, she said, that kind of light. It’s not good to be out in it.
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And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.