Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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Maybe the river was made of our tears. Mine and Sam’s. Maybe the river was made of everybody’s tears. Everybody who had ever lost anybody. All those tears.
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He wanted to ask her how many men had fallen in love with her. But she wasn’t the kind of woman who let you ask that question.
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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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But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.
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So they made tamales and Ileana mostly made a mess, but she laughed all day and she was so happy and beautiful and Andrés thought that whatever her heart was made of, it burned, and it was the only light in the house that mattered.
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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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You see, the thing with adults is that respect is just a word they use to guilt us nonadults into doing what they want us to do.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
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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?
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It could happen anytime. The finger tightens, pulls, and a bullet goes flying through the air. That's how remembering is.
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I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
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The Sam I knew was never in control of her emotions. But on that day she was wearing dignity. So much more beautiful than pearls.
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He hoped the dead couldn’t see the living. He hoped his mother couldn’t see what was happening to them. She didn’t deserve to see this.
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He didn’t say anything. And then I heard him crying. So I just let him cry. There was nothing I could do. Except listen to his pain. I could do that. I could hardly stand it. But I could do that. Just listen to his pain.
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Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.
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I didn't care because what mattered is that Dante's voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren't.
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I'll always hate shoes.
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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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We laughed again. We couldn’t stop. I wondered what it was we were laughing about. Was it just our names? Were we laughing because we were relieved? Were we happy? Laughter was another one of life’s mysteries.
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Maybe that’s why I felt sad and empty—because I’d missed him all my life.
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The world had changed. And this new world was quiet and sad.