Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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Moms and God generally get along pretty well.
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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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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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Maybe that’s why I felt sad and empty—because I’d missed him all my life.
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Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
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But what really bugged the living crap out of me was that my mother had more friends than I did. How saw was that?
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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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Maybe kissing was part of the human condition.
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They broke more than his ribs.
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I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
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I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.
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I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
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As I nodded my head to the beat, I started wondering what had gone through Richie Valens’s head before the plane crashed into the unforgiving ground. Hey, Buddy! The music’s over. For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
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I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.
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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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I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out.
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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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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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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Maybe life was just a series of phases—one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I’d be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards. Not that I really believed in my mom’s phase theory. It didn’t sound like an explanation—it sounded like an excuse. I don’t think my mom got the whole guy thing. I didn’t get the guy thing either. And I was a guy.
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When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.
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So I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah I had all kinds of reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.