Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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How strange to have a body. Sometimes it felt that way. Strange.
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I like the old words better. They're like old friends.
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I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it. A lousy piece of paper. That’s me. A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
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Mima. No despair. She was dying, and there was not one sign of despair in her dancing eyes.
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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.
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I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
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Absent parents aren't abusive per se. They're neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they're not parents in the way that we might think of it.
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Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?
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Do you think the heart needs love to keep on beating?
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It would be so effen great if the whole world laughed more- the whole world. I don't mean the kind of laughing that's putting someone down. I mean the kind of laughing that means you've just discovered something really beautiful.
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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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Listen, the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip. You can't take The freeway. Back roads, buddy, that's all you got. Unpaved back roads And bad weather. Storms, baby. Don't expect to get there fast. And don't expect yourself or your car to arrive in mint condition.
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Sometimes heaven was feeling nothing. Maybe being drunk was a little like dying and going to heaven. Like living in the light. He kept thinking of Ileana. She was eight now.
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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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She had lived her life trying to look straight at things, straight at them knowing that there would come a day when she would look at something so hard that it would look right back and break her. Well, wasn’t she made of flesh and bone? Wasn’t she made to break? Sure. Wasn’t she a woman?
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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 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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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
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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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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 also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
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I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.
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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.