Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
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God, it would never go away, this anger, this rage that was like the ceaseless movement of the spring winds through the desert, this knot in his guts, this splinter in his heart that shot a pain through him that eventually found its way into his lungs, then out of his mouth and into the open air, the sound making the whole world turn away from him. It would never go away, never, never, and there would never be any peace. Maybe he had it all wrong, maybe he wasn't a victim at all, not at all, because he had decided that this was the only thing that would ever be truly his, and so he clung to it, would cling to it forever.
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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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Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal? Is that something I should aspire to?
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We think there's a reason for everything, as if life was supposed to make sense. It's not exactly math. People aren't numbers. Everybody knows life doesn't make any sense at all, so we just better deal with the whole mess. Have a beer. Have a cup of coffee. Have a piece of cake. Go out to a movie. Enjoy the Popcorn.
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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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If you don't remember something, it doesn't hurt.
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And every time I did spectacularly well in my classes, and I'm here to tell you that I did spectacularly well, I could always see the look of surprise on my professors' faces. You don't think I noticed? What you saw on Dave's face, I saw every damned day of my academic career. So what, Andres? I wanted to do something, to be something - and I did it. I don't think I deserve a medal, and I don't think I'm particularly special. I wanted to do something, and I figured out a way to do it.
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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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Love is a storm that twists and mangles us. If you love—if you really love—if you have that kind of heart—then you know. (And if you don’t, there is no explaining.) The storm comes from within. There is nothing you can do to prepare.
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God, his heart could be loud sometimes, loud as if it had its own will, its own logic, its own voice.
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But maybe there isn’t a logic behind the word family. The truth is, it isn’t always such a good word.
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There was a tear running down his cheek. It seemed like a river in the light of the setting sun.
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I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
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I just drove. I could have driven forever. I don’t know how I managed to find my spot in the desert, but I found it. It was as if I had a compass hidden somewhere inside me. One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.
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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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No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
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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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Reading my own words embarrassed the hell out of me. I mean, what a pendejo. I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity.
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I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn't even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism.
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The heart, yeah, sometimes I didn’t get it. But if we were making each other laugh and smile, maybe it was part of the way human beings loved each other.
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Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.
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What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky.