Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Because rooms were always full, full of memories and voices and people who were either dead or impossible to love.
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Every time someone asks him a question, he just reaches in his pocket and pulls out an answer – but the guy sounds like a cardboard.
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Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.
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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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Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.
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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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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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I liked watching them, all three of them around my truck. I wanted time to stop because everything seemed so simple, Dante and Legs falling in love with each other, Dante's mom and dad remembering something about their youth as they examined my truck, and me, the proud owner. I had something of value– even if it was just a truck that brought out a sweet nostalgia in people. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever.
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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 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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Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
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I hated when Rafael said he hated himself. Sometimes he would say something like that. I just didn’t like hearing that. Why would he want to hate himself? Okay, people don’t really want to hate themselves. I get that. It comes from somewhere deep inside and getting to that place is hard as hell. I get that too. This is my theory: the people who shouldn’t hate themselves, do hate themselves. And the people who should hate themselves, don’t hate themselves. The world is all backwards. See, this is one of the many reasons why God and I are not good friends.
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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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I had learned to hide what I felt. No, that's not true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt.
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And everything in the world that mattered was in the happy stories Andrés was telling. And everything in the world was Ileana listening to the brother she loved. And everything in the world was waiting.
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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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I don't know what the exact shape of my life will take--and what the days to come will bring--except i know that i am happy and my heart is still. I know that I have fallen in love with the word surrender and know that I can no longer live in disappointment.
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Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal? Is that something I should aspire to?
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He drags it out of her, all those feelings she has.
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What I wanted to tell her was that I didn’t care about sin or about God. I wanted to tell her that God was just a beautiful idea and I didn’t care about beautiful ideas and that He was just a word I hadn’t run into yet, hadn’t met yet, and so He was still a stranger. I wanted to tell her that she was real, and she was so much more beautiful than an idea.
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She does not know how to measure her life. When Sam was alive, she measured it through his love. She had always measured herself through the look in his eyes. She is afraid of admitting that to herself.
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And even me who did know them. I—I hated being loved by them. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t. It is useless to run from a storm. So I stayed. I know about storms as well as anyone.
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But what really bugged the living crap out of me was that my mother had more friends than I did. How saw was that?