Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Change is overrated.
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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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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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Ari, it’s time you stopped running.
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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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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 I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah I had all kinds of reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.
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Smiles are like that. They come and go.
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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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I think I was trying to make my life uncomplicated because everything inside of me was so confusing.
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That’s what his mother had told him, that Mexico tasted of maíz and the hands of the women who’d made tortillas for a thousand years.
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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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I could have asked my father lots of questions. I could have. But there was something in his face and eyes and in his crooked smile that prevented me from asking. I guess I didn’t believe he wanted me to know who he was. So I just collected clues. Watching my father read that book was another clue in my collection. Some day all the clues would come together. And I would solve the mystery of my father.
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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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A heart so pure it was nothing but storm.
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I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.
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Like an animal. As if people weren’t animals. She tried to put a face on him. His eyes would betray the chaos of his heart, the riots that were exploding everywhere inside him. His eyes would be so black that they would shine blue in the sun.
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There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal.
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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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The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.
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The truth is, Ari, I miss El Paso. When we first moved there, I hated it. But now I think about El Paso all the time. And I think of you. Always, Dante P.S.
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But why? Why don’t I want to fight when fight is all I’ve ever known and loved? I’ve fought for every inch of joy I’ve ever known.
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Mima was like the tree. In this desert where I’d grown up, Mima had shaded me from the sun. She was a tree. How would I live without that tree?