Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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It could happen anytime. The finger tightens, pulls, and a bullet goes flying through the air. That's how remembering is.
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I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel ever again.
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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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She was staring at a picture of me and Sam when we were seven. No front teeth. We were standing in the front yard. It was summer and the leaves of her mulberry tree were behind us. The caption read: She was always my sister.
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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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..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
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There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.
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She sounded a little angry. I loved her anger and wished I had more of it. Her anger was different than mine or my father’s. Her anger didn’t paralyze her.
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I want to gather up all the words in the world and write them down on little pieces of paper—then throw them in the air. They would look like tiny sparrows flying toward the sun. Without all those words, the sky would be clear and perfect and blue. The deafening world would be beautiful in all that silence.
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I didn't care because what mattered is that Dante's voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren't.
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As I nodded my head to the beat, I started wondering what had gone through Richie Valens’s head before the plane crashed into the unforgiving ground. Hey, Buddy! The music’s over. For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
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If you don't remember something, it doesn't hurt.
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If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
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Her mother had left a note on the bathroom mirror, written in lipstick: just because my love isn't perfect doesn't mean I don't love you.
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I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.
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There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.
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If you can’t put it into words, then you just don’t know.
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I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out.
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There's nothing ordinary about you. Nothing ordinary at all.
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This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
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But how did you freeze a heart, the days and weeks and months that made a life?
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Do you think the heart needs love to keep on beating?
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I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.
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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.