Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Remember this: Nothing is as simple as a storm. Ask anyone. They will tell you—those who know about storms—to get out of its path. If you can. If you have time. They will tell you nothing can stop a storm. Save yourself. Run. But there is no running. Laugh at yourself for thinking of escape. Remember this: Nothing can destroy a storm except itself. It must hurt and blow and wail till it dies. You will not be alive to clean up the debris. All the light will be gone.
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I don't mind working. And anyway, what would I do? I don't like to watch TV. I'm out of touch with my own generation. And I have you and Mom to thank for that.
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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 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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She looked like a summer garden.
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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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I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
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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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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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Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.
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God, I was beginning to hate this hope inside me. Sometimes, hope kept you from seeing the truth. Sometimes hope made you keep holding on to something that you should let go of.
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We left him there. Louie. We left him.” I watched my father lean into his own arms and sob. There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal. My heart was breaking. All this time, I’d wanted my father to tell me something about the war and now I couldn’t stand to see the rawness of his pain, how new it was after so many years, how that pain was alive and thriving just beneath the surface.
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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.
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Maybe life was just a series of phases—one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I’d be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards. Not that I really believed in my mom’s phase theory. It didn’t sound like an explanation—it sounded like an excuse. I don’t think my mom got the whole guy thing. I didn’t get the guy thing either. And I was a guy.
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If things could always be the way they were now. If only.
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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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When I looked through the telescope, Dante began explaining what I was looking at. I didn’t hear a word. Something happened inside me as I looked out into the vast universe. Through that telescope, the world was closer and larger than I’d ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and—I don’t know—it made me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered.
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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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Bullshit, Ari. You have the harder rule to follow? Buffalo shit. Coyote shit. All you have to do is be loyal to the most brilliant guy you've ever met—which is like walking barefoot through the park. I, on the other hand, have to refrain from kissing the greatest guy in the universe—which is like walking barefoot on hot coals.
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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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..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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Maybe that's what life was. You zigged and you zagged and zigged and zagged some more.
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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.
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Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.