Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I've been hurting most of my life. I tried to pretend I wasn't. I even believed my own lie. I've lived my entire life trying to avoid pain...That's a terrible way to live. I don't care any more if it hurts...If I'm working on a painting, and it doesn't hurt, then the painting won't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then it isn't real—then I'm not real...I have a new theory...if I develop a great capacity for feeling pain, then I am also developing a great capacity for feeling happiness.
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I loved the different rules of summer.
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I think I was trying to make my life uncomplicated because everything inside of me was so confusing.
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I'll always hate shoes.
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The storm was fierce. But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my father’s love was fiercer than any storm.
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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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She could almost see his smile. A sunrise. Breaking the darkness.
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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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They broke more than his ribs.
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
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I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
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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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Maybe dogs were one of the secrets of the universe.
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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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And it seemed as if the pounding rain would tear off the roof of their house. For an instant, Andrés felt as if there would never again be any light in their house. It would always be dark. And then he thought that no matter how much they’d tried to change this house into something else, it would always be that house they found the first day they moved in. A house with no light. A house with no one in it. A house that smelled of a hundred years of waste and war. A heartless, heartless house.
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We left him there. Louie. We left him.” I watched my father lean into his own arms and sob. There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal. My heart was breaking. All this time, I’d wanted my father to tell me something about the war and now I couldn’t stand to see the rawness of his pain, how new it was after so many years, how that pain was alive and thriving just beneath the surface.
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I wanted us to laugh forever.
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The Ari I used to be didn't exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet.
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Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?
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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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Dante and I were cursed with parents who cared. Why couldn't they just leave us alone? What ever happened to parents who were too busy or too selfish or just didn't give a shit about what their sons did?
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Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
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I can prove there are madmen—but I can't prove the monster exists. Who was it that whispered the warning? Listen close, the sky is falling.