Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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He wanted to ask her how many men had fallen in love with her. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who let you ask that question.
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Maybe my life isn't all that interesting but at least I'm busy. Busy doesn't mean happy. I know that. But at least I'm not bored. Being bored is the worst.
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That’s what his mother had told him, that Mexico tasted of maíz and the hands of the women who’d made tortillas for a thousand years.
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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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But in art class, all you had to do was try. I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.
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It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
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Moms and God generally get along pretty well.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
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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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And why were the voices there, but he knew why and he knew they would always be there, the voices, knocking at his door, taking over his house.
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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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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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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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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 thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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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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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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When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
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I'll always hate shoes.
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Do you think, Ari, that love has anything to do with the secrets of the universe? I don’t know. Maybe.
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People love a show, especially when freaks are involved.
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They broke more than his ribs.
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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.