Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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’d watched them in all their beautiful courage. I’d watched them as they struggled through their hurts and their wounds.
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Sometimes he feels as though God is nothing more than a set of jaws that bites down on his heart.
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There was this thing, this chaos inside me. And it had a noise, a howling. That’s what it was. I was nothing more than a dog or a coyote or any other animal in pain. And even then I was trying to speak. But my words weren’t any use in the face of the terrible wind that was escaping from my heart. I guess it was from my heart. It hurt so bad. Why did it hurt so bad?
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People talk about the highway of life, but I think that’s crap. Highways are nice and paved, and they have signs telling you which way to go. Life isn’t like that at all. There are days when great things happen and everything is beautiful and perfect, and then, just like that, everything can go straight to hell. It’s like getting drunk. At first it feels kinda nice and all relaxed. And all of a sudden the room is spinning and you are throwing up, and, well, maybe life is a little like that.
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I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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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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I watched her hands as they worked the batter over with a wooden spoon. I wanted to kiss them.
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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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Maybe dogs were one of the secrets of the universe.
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I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
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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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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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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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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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People love a show, especially when freaks are involved.
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I don’t know if I believed in the war or not, Ari. I don’t think I did. I think about it a lot. But I signed up. And I don’t know what I felt about this country. I do know that the only country I had were the men that fought side by side. They were my country, Ari. Them. Louie and Beckett and Garcia and Al and Gio—they were my country. I’m not proud of everything I did in that war. I wasn’t always a good soldier. I wasn’t always a good man. War did something to us. To me. To all of us. But the men we left behind. Those are the ones who are in my dreams.
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Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people let everyone in and let themselves be stepped all over. This equals unhealthy.
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Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.
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Parents are rule givers.
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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 prefer law to war under all circumstances.
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He started crying. Dante and his tears. Dante and his tears. You pushed me. You pushed me and you saved my life.