Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.
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I wanted to tell her that I thought she had a beautiful heart.
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Euphoric memory. That’s what Adam called it. Some of you guys even get high remembering.
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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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They broke more than his ribs.
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And what constituted a cure? What was healing for a damaged human being? Who needed help and who didn’t? And anyway, was there really a cure for the truly hurt? People could be totaled, just like cars.
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Change is overrated.
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You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
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At twelve, he was very much still a child. Some boys were already on their way to becoming men at twelve. But not this boy, perhaps the most beautiful boy he has ever seen. He is as sad as he is beautiful. He wants to hold Andrés in his arms and tell him no harm will come to him. But he knows that harm has already come. He hopes it has not come to stay.
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I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
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I've been hurting most of my life. I tried to pretend I wasn't. I even believed my own lie. I've lived my entire life trying to avoid pain...That's a terrible way to live. I don't care any more if it hurts...If I'm working on a painting, and it doesn't hurt, then the painting won't matter. And if it doesn't matter, then it isn't real—then I'm not real...I have a new theory...if I develop a great capacity for feeling pain, then I am also developing a great capacity for feeling happiness.
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Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.
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Somehow, miraculously, they forced themselves, told themselves they were going to live. They wrote themselves new lives. Fictions, perhaps, but what did it matter? They had kept the chaos at bay. They had managed to stop cursing the darkness. They’d lit a torch.
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I never cared much for people with money. They were a little too proud of themselves, too entitled. They never entertained the possibility that they might just be overpaid.
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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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Ari, it’s time you stopped running.
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Love is work, amor. It's not something that just happens.
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This boy would dream her forever.
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The thing about artists is that they tell stories. I mean, some paintings are like novels.
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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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And he raised his arm like he was going to slap her. But he stopped himself. Yolie looked at him, and Andrés swore her eyes were knives and she was cutting him up like he was a piece of paper. And right then, at that moment, he loved Yolie, loved her with all his heart.
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It was like letting go of the sky.
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For an instant she seemed to be nothing more than light.
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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.