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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I like the old words better. They're like old friends.
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I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.
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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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Maybe kissing was part of the human condition.
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Patience is a gift you have to work for.
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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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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.
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Life had its seasons, and the season of letting go would always come, but there was something very beautiful in that, in the letting go. Leaves were always graceful as they floated away from the tree.
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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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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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She had lived her life trying to look straight at things, straight at them knowing that there would come a day when she would look at something so hard that it would look right back and break her. Well, wasn’t she made of flesh and bone? Wasn’t she made to break? Sure. Wasn’t she a woman?
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I wanted to feel those words in my mouth as I spoke them aloud. Words could be like food—they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something. “My brother is in prison.” Those words tasted bitter.
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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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You’re such a school teacher.
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Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.
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Maybe dogs were one of the secrets of the universe.
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I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.
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I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
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Show me a man without regrets and I’ll show you a man without a conscience.
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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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You see, the thing with adults is that respect is just a word they use to guilt us nonadults into doing what they want us to do.
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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.