Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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Sometimes he feels as though God is nothing more than a set of jaws that bites down on his heart.
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He looked at the stubborn woman standing in front of him, her hair uncombed and wild, her eyes red with tears, her face wounded. In that moment, he thought, she was as beautiful as she had ever been.
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People love a show, especially when freaks are involved.
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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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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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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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Everywhere you went, you left something behind. Maybe someday he would come back and get it.
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Just like that—in one apocalyptic moment—simple and beautiful. A birth. But also a kind of death. Like lightning in a storm. In one flash of light, the whole desert was lit, and you could see the universe. That’s what she had seen—the universe in the hands of a child feeling the face of a man.
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Parents are rule givers.
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I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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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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It's a complex thing when you're writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious. I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance - and I come by this naturally, or I think I do - I am a very good judge of character.
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What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky.
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She could almost see his smile. A sunrise. Breaking the darkness.
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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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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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His smile was breaking my heart.
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I'll always hate shoes.
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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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The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
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We all fight our own private wars.
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I’ll tell you a secret. I’m not responsible for whether my students care or don’t care. That care has to come from them—not me.” “Where does that leave you?” “No matter what, Ari, my job is to care.” “Even when they don’t?” “Even when they don’t.” “No matter what?” “No matter what.