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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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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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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This boy would dream her forever.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
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The thing about artists is that they tell stories. I mean, some paintings are like novels.
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The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
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His smile was breaking my heart.
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The truth is, Ari, I miss El Paso. When we first moved there, I hated it. But now I think about El Paso all the time. And I think of you. Always, Dante P.S.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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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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When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending. I'd get up and look in the mirror and my eyes were sad.
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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.
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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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She could almost see his smile. A sunrise. Breaking the darkness.
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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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Maybe dogs were one of the secrets of the universe.
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God, his heart could be loud sometimes, loud as if it had its own will, its own logic, its own voice.
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The only class that I was having a hard time with was my art elective. I couldn’t draw worth a damn. I was pretty good at trees. I sucked at drawing faces. 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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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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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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And it seemed as if the pounding rain would tear off the roof of their house. For an instant, Andrés felt as if there would never again be any light in their house. It would always be dark. And then he thought that no matter how much they’d tried to change this house into something else, it would always be that house they found the first day they moved in. A house with no light. A house with no one in it. A house that smelled of a hundred years of waste and war. A heartless, heartless house.
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I loved the different rules of summer.