Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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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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Show me a man without regrets and I’ll show you a man without a conscience.
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They broke more than his ribs.
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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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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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Still as death, and Andrés felt as if it were up to him to make noise so that his sister would know they were still alive.
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On the other hand, Uncle Mickey liked to say that everybody deserved a day off from the truth.
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I just drove. I could have driven forever. I don’t know how I managed to find my spot in the desert, but I found it. It was as if I had a compass hidden somewhere inside me. One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.
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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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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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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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I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
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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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When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
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Being on the verge of seventeen could be harsh and painful and confusing. Being on the verge of seventeen really suck.
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My dad says it’s all right if people make fun of you. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Dante, you’re an intellectual. That’s who you are. Don’t be ashamed of that.
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You see, the thing with adults is that respect is just a word they use to guilt us nonadults into doing what they want us to do.
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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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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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But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
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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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Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.