Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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The sky was angry and shouting, and it reminded Andrés of how Mando and his father had shouted at each other and had drowned out the sound of love.
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Like an animal. As if people weren’t animals. She tried to put a face on him. His eyes would betray the chaos of his heart, the riots that were exploding everywhere inside him. His eyes would be so black that they would shine blue in the sun.
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And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.
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Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?
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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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I wanted us to laugh forever.
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One of books is about the genocide in Rwanda and the other book is about a little boy who gets raped. Who needs monsters?
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Listen, the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip. You can't take The freeway. Back roads, buddy, that's all you got. Unpaved back roads And bad weather. Storms, baby. Don't expect to get there fast. And don't expect yourself or your car to arrive in mint condition.
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Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
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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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I thought it was nice that they knew how to talk and how to laugh and how to be in the world.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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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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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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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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I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
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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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There were so many ghosts in our house...And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn't even met yet. They were there. Lying in wait.
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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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When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
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People love a show, especially when freaks are involved.
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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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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.