Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Sincere. You are. You take the world home with you every night.
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He looked at the stubborn woman standing in front of him, her hair uncombed and wild, her eyes red with tears, her face wounded. In that moment, he thought, she was as beautiful as she had ever been.
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Reading my own words embarrassed the hell out of me. I mean, what a pendejo. I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity.
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Were you afraid Dad wouldn’t come back? I didn’t think about it. I made myself not think about it. I’m good at that.
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And then I don't know why, but I felt sad. And then I started thinking about my brother. Every time I felt sad, I thought about him. Maybe deep down a part of me was always thinking about him. Sometimes, I caught myself spelling out his name. B-E-R-N-A-R-D-O. What was my brain doing, spelling out his name without my permission?
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We stood there for long time. Neither one of us said anything. I felt small and insignificant and inadequate. I hated feeling that way. I was going to stop feeling that way. I was going to stop.
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I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
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Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire?
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Change is overrated.
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It was like letting go of the sky.
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There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.
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The words I’m sorry did not appear in the conversation, though it was what we ate for dinner.
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I didn’t feel like a man just then. I felt like a five-year-old boy who didn’t want to do anything except play in a pile of leaves. A five-year-old boy with a greedy heart who wanted his grandmother to live forever.
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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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Who hurt you? When did it happen? How many times? Where? Tell me. Why do you hate yourself? Where do you keep the hurt?
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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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It's always been interesting to me how we mistake good genes for virtue.
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I can prove there are madmen—but I can't prove the monster exists. Who was it that whispered the warning? Listen close, the sky is falling.
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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.
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I have this storm inside me. It's trying to kill me. I wonder sometimes if that's such a bad thing. I know about storms. I'm tired. I just want to sleep forever. Maybe I should tell the storm to go ahead and kill me.
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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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The world could be as small as it was cruel. She wondered at God sometimes, his schemes, his plans, his plots, his sense of order. Maybe he was just like the Bible—beautiful and overwritten and redundant and badly in need of editing.
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As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.
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Love is work, amor. It's not something that just happens.