-
God, his heart could be loud sometimes, loud as if it had its own will, its own logic, its own voice.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Breakfast seemed to be a good time for throwing your emotions around. Jodie said that at this place emotions were like Frisbees – people just tossed them around all day long like they were at a park.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
They broke more than his ribs.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
When I see him today, I will show him my ugly heart. I’m not fucking sorry.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
And every time I did spectacularly well in my classes, and I'm here to tell you that I did spectacularly well, I could always see the look of surprise on my professors' faces. You don't think I noticed? What you saw on Dave's face, I saw every damned day of my academic career. So what, Andres? I wanted to do something, to be something - and I did it. I don't think I deserve a medal, and I don't think I'm particularly special. I wanted to do something, and I figured out a way to do it.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
And—for the longest second—how he’d wanted to jump in an ocean, scrub himself raw until all of his skin was gone so he could grow a new outer shell, a shell that man hadn’t touched, and he hated how everything came back to him in an instant almost as if it wasn’t a memory at all but a moment in time he was condemned to live and relive, a scene in his life he’d have to step into over and over again until he got his lines right, but he would always get it wrong.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
I guess life hurt everybody. I didn't understand the logic of this thing we called living. Maybe I wasn't supposed to.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
She had lived her life trying to look straight at things, straight at them knowing that there would come a day when she would look at something so hard that it would look right back and break her. Well, wasn’t she made of flesh and bone? Wasn’t she made to break? Sure. Wasn’t she a woman?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
There’s always a but when you’re losing an argument.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Euphoric memory. That’s what Adam called it. Some of you guys even get high remembering.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
This boy would dream her forever.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Because you didn’t need words when you were sitting in the light.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
The thing about artists is that they tell stories. I mean, some paintings are like novels.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
That was how she said goodbye to the world. To the people she loved. She was going to leave this earth the same way her mother had. With all the grace of the old world. The old, dying world.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Mima. No despair. She was dying, and there was not one sign of despair in her dancing eyes.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
For an instant she seemed to be nothing more than light.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
-
Typically, I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
