Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
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I took out my journal. I'd been avoiding writing in it. I think I was afraid all my anger would spill out on the pages. And I just didn't want to look at all that rage. It was a different kind of pain. A pain I couldn't stand. I tried not to think. I just started writing.
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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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You fight yourself, Zach. And you keep fighting yourself. And it's killing you because you're fighting the best part of yourself.
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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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And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.
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Everything was fading, all the lights in the room going out. And the sun, too. It was all so odd, as if the whole world had stepped out, run away from her—left her. Alone. In the dark. God. Everything was as black as Andrés Segovia’s eyes.
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Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.
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Like a girl, but a girl who had always been a woman.
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I’ll always remember that look on your face. You saw me. You’ve always seen me. And I think that’s all that anyone wants. That’s why Fito loves coming over here. He’s been invisible all his life. And all of a sudden he’s visible. Seeing someone. Really seeing someone. That’s love.
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I don't always have to understand the people I love.
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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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He wanted to ask her how many men had fallen in love with her. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who let you ask that question.
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Talking to myself in my journal qualified as talking to someone my own age.
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Maybe the sun had set. Maybe the rainbow had lifted—because the light was gone.
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I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out.
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I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.
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It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
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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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Maybe kissing was part of the human condition.
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I've learned a few things about ugly memories--they shoot through the heart like a bullet that maims and disfigures. A bullet that doesn't have the decency to kill.
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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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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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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?