Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I suppose to do with that information? Just tell me that.
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You’re such a school teacher.
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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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I guess life hurt everybody. I didn't understand the logic of this thing we called living. Maybe I wasn't supposed to.
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And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.
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She sounded a little angry. I loved her anger and wished I had more of it. Her anger was different than mine or my father’s. Her anger didn’t paralyze her.
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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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It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.
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His smile was breaking my heart.
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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 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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The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
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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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We stood there for long time. Neither one of us said anything. I felt small and insignificant and inadequate. I hated feeling that way. I was going to stop feeling that way. I was going to stop.
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Typically, I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything.
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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 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.
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Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
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Euphoric memory. That’s what Adam called it. Some of you guys even get high remembering.
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Everything was fading, all the lights in the room going out. And the sun, too. It was all so odd, as if the whole world had stepped out, run away from her—left her. Alone. In the dark. God. Everything was as black as Andrés Segovia’s eyes.
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He didn’t say anything. And then I heard him crying. So I just let him cry. There was nothing I could do. Except listen to his pain. I could do that. I could hardly stand it. But I could do that. Just listen to his pain.
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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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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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Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?