Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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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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I sat in the truck and had to force myself to rejoin the party. I hated parties—even the ones thrown in my honor.
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I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
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And then I knew that I would have to relearn the meaning of every word I had ever learned. I would have to learn how to translate all those words. Thousands of them. Millions of them. And then I smiled and felt the tears running down my face. Finally I understood. It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was me. I mattered. So now I would have to fight to translate myself back into the world of the living.
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It was better to be alone miserable. It was better to drown.
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That was the first time I did coke. My body, it was electric. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had a real heart and a real body and I knew that there was this fire in me that could have lit up the entire universe. No book had ever made me feel that way. No human being had ever made me feel like that.
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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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Somehow I’d hoped that this would be the summer that I would discover that I was alive. The world my mom and dad said was out there waiting for me. That world doesn’t actually exist.
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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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One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds. Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere.
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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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I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
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I looked out the window at the black clouds ahead of us. I opened the back window and smelled the rain. You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss.
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I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god.
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But you know we’re always going to have to rely on the goodwill of those of you who are straight for our survival. And that’s the damned truth.
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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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Dogs were lucky—they didn’t need to live forever. They weren’t as greedy as people.
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I wanted us to laugh forever.
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Everywhere you went, you left something behind. Maybe someday he would come back and get it.
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Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?
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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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My dad says it’s all right if people make fun of you. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Dante, you’re an intellectual. That’s who you are. Don’t be ashamed of that.