Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Do you think we’ll ever discover all 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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Dogs were lucky—they didn’t need to live forever. They weren’t as greedy as people.
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Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
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This boy would dream her forever.
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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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When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.
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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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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 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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I noticed his smile was a little sad. Maybe everyone was a little sad. Maybe so.
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We laughed again. We couldn’t stop. I wondered what it was we were laughing about. Was it just our names? Were we laughing because we were relieved? Were we happy? Laughter was another one of life’s mysteries.
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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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Parents are rule givers.
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You fight yourself, Zach. And you keep fighting yourself. And it's killing you because you're fighting the best part of yourself.
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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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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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Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart? I wondered if there was a way to keep her in this world forever.
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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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You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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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.