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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I didn't care because what mattered is that Dante's voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren't.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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People love a show, especially when freaks are involved.
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Like a girl, but a girl who had always been a woman.
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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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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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Maybe that’s why I felt sad and empty—because I’d missed him all my life.
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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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The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
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My dad picked me up and rocked me in the chair. I felt small and weak and I wanted to hold him back but I couldn’t because there wasn’t any strength in my arms, and I wanted to ask him if he had held me like this when I was a boy because I didn’t remember and why didn’t I remember. I started to think that maybe I was still dreaming, but my mother was changing the sheets on my bed so I knew that everything was real. Except me. I think I was mumbling. My father held me tighter and whispered something, but not even his arms or his whispers could keep me from trembling. My mom dried my sweaty body with a towel and she and my dad changed me into a clean T-shirt and clean underwear. And then I said the strangest thing, “Don’t throw my T-shirt away. Dad gave it to me.” I knew I was crying, but I didn’t know why because I wasn’t the kind of guy who cried, and I thought that maybe it was someone else who was crying.
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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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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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I'll always hate shoes.
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It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
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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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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.
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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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I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.
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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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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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Moms and God generally get along pretty well.
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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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They broke more than his ribs.