Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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.
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I wanted to tell her that I thought she had a beautiful heart.
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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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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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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.
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I noticed his smile was a little sad. Maybe everyone was a little sad. Maybe so.
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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.
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Moms and God generally get along pretty well.
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The world had changed. And this new world was quiet and sad.
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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.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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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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I loved the different rules of summer.
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Summer had come and gone. Summer had come and gone. And the world was ending.
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It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
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I think of their anger as a wind. And that wind took them away. From me. And all the others like me.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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She wrapped her hands around my face and looked into my eyes. Her hands were old, but they were the softest, kindest hands that had ever touched me. She didn’t say anything. She just smiled.
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My father decided he would read everything that I read. Maybe that was our way of talking.
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Life can be hard. I know how hard it can be.” And then she said, “Déjate querer.” Let yourself be loved.
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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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You know, it was beautiful to be in that kitchen just then. I guess there are times of quiet beauty in life.
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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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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.