Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
I guess life hurt everybody. I didn't understand the logic of this thing we called living. Maybe I wasn't supposed to.
-
We all fight our own private wars.
-
When I got home, I sat on my front porch. I watched the sun set. I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I really liked being alone. Maybe I liked it too much. Maybe my father was like that too. I thought of Dante and wondered about him. And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness. Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?
-
Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.
-
I looked out the window at the black clouds ahead of us. I opened the back window and smelled the rain. You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss.
-
And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.
-
Gina and Susie were cool, though. No hint of the beer they said they were going to score. They played good girls to my parents. Not that they weren't good girls. That's exactly what they were: good girls who wanted to pretend they were bad girls but who never would be bad girls because they were too decent.
-
Sometimes he feels as though God is nothing more than a set of jaws that bites down on his heart.
-
Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much. Maybe the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn't control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could.
-
If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
-
God, tired, all he wanted to do was sleep, be in bed, dreaming of palo verdes in bloom, the yellow blossoms bursting in the blue sky like firecrackers. He wanted to dream soft hands rubbing his skin. He pictured himself melting beneath those hands, like butter or ice cream or anything else that wasn’t human.
-
I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
-
My dad says it’s all right if people make fun of you. You know what he said to me? He said, ‘Dante, you’re an intellectual. That’s who you are. Don’t be ashamed of that.
-
Mima. No despair. She was dying, and there was not one sign of despair in her dancing eyes.
-
Euphoric memory. That’s what Adam called it. Some of you guys even get high remembering.
-
I was fifteen. I was bored. I was miserable.
-
Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.
-
And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
-
Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
-
But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
-
I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
-
I’ll always remember that look on your face. You saw me. You’ve always seen me. And I think that’s all that anyone wants. That’s why Fito loves coming over here. He’s been invisible all his life. And all of a sudden he’s visible. Seeing someone. Really seeing someone. That’s love.
-
I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
-
It could happen anytime. The finger tightens, pulls, and a bullet goes flying through the air. That's how remembering is.