Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
-
She could almost see his smile. A sunrise. Breaking the darkness.
-
I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself. That sucked. I had serious problems.
-
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.
-
Maybe my life isn't all that interesting but at least I'm busy. Busy doesn't mean happy. I know that. But at least I'm not bored. Being bored is the worst.
-
Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.
-
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.
-
Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.
-
I'll always hate shoes.
-
The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
-
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.
-
I loved the different rules of summer.
-
We all fight our own private wars.
-
It could happen anytime. The finger tightens, pulls, and a bullet goes flying through the air. That's how remembering is.
-
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.
-
I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
-
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.
-
Maybe that’s why I felt sad and empty—because I’d missed him all my life.
-
I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is.
-
I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.
-
I wanted to tell her that I thought she had a beautiful heart.
-
It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
-
I've learned a few things about ugly memories--they shoot through the heart like a bullet that maims and disfigures. A bullet that doesn't have the decency to kill.
-
Like a girl, but a girl who had always been a woman.