Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds. Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere.
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You don't deserve this, Brian." I wanted to shove that phrase into his heart. But I knew he'd always believe that he did deserve what he got.
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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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And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.
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When I got home, I sat on my front porch. I watched the sun set. I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I really liked being alone. Maybe I liked it too much. Maybe my father was like that too. I thought of Dante and wondered about him. And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness. Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?
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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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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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It was better to be alone miserable. It was better to drown.
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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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If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
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In order to be wildly popular you had to make people believe that you were fun and interesting I just wasn't that much of a con artist.
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Maybe I was a little superior. But I don't think I was superior. I just didn't understand how to talk to them, how to be myself around them. Being around other guys didn't make me feel smarter. Being around other guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all part of this club and I wasn't a member.
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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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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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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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He knew that an angel would give his mother a light, because she’d been good. And she would share the light with his father. Because that’s the way she was.
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There were so many ghosts in our house...And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn't even met yet. They were there. Lying in wait.
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The Ari I used to be didn't exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet.
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There's nothing ordinary about you. Nothing ordinary at all.
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And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.
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I didn’t know why I was thinking about all these things—except that’s what I always did. I guess I had my own personal television in my brain. I could control whatever I wanted to watch. I could switch the channels anytime I wanted.
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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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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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Maybe the heart did change shape. And not just when it loved. When it was hurt. When it was angry. When it hated. When it remembered. When it yearned. When it mourned.