Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
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.
-
Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?
-
I don't always have to understand the people I love.
-
I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
-
I sat in the truck and had to force myself to rejoin the party. I hated parties—even the ones thrown in my honor.
-
She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god.
-
And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.
-
I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.
-
We all fight our own private wars.
-
The heart, yeah, sometimes I didn’t get it. But if we were making each other laugh and smile, maybe it was part of the way human beings loved each other.
-
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.
-
If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
-
I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.