Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself. That sucked. I had serious problems.
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Talking doesn't help everybody. "Not that you'd know." Yeah. Not that I'd know.
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I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born beautiful in order to dream beautiful things. God didn't write beautiful on my heart. I'm stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that's the way it is for me. Look, there's nothing I can do about it.
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I sat in the truck and had to force myself to rejoin the party. I hated parties—even the ones thrown in my honor.
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Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.
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Guess that's a part of what the living did, they took care of their dead.
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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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There’s always a but when you’re losing an argument.
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Do you think, Ari, that love has anything to do with the secrets of the universe? I don’t know. Maybe.
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It was a small idea. But at least the idea was mine.
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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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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?
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It was too hard, too messy, too complicated. I sort of lived in a self-imposed exile for a good many years. I went away to college, lived my own life, chased my dreams, tried to face some demons. I guess I thought I could do all those things on my won. I thought that because I was gay, my family, well, they'd hate me or they wouldn't understand me or they'd send me away. So I just sent myself away. It was easier for me to pretend that I didn't belong to a family. I tried to pretend I didn't belong to anyone
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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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People can be cruel. People hate what they don’t understand.” “But, Dad, they don’t want to understand.” “Maybe they don’t. But we have to find a way to discipline our hearts so that their cruelty doesn’t turn us into hurt animals.
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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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Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
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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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His sadness was unbearable to watch. Far worse than his rage. He looked so defeated in that sorrow—like he was surrendering, like the battle was too much.
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One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds. Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere.
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When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science.
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I stared at the reproduced mural in the book--but I was more interested in his finger as he tapped the book with approval. That finger had pulled a trigger in a war. That finger had touched my mother in tender ways I did not fully comprehend. I wanted to talk, to say something, to ask questions. But I couldn't. All the words were stuck in my throat. So I just nodded.
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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.