Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew up without television.
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Everyone was becoming someone else. Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old.
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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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I wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.
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When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science.
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For an instant she seemed to be nothing more than light.
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It was like letting go of the sky.
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I’m not into all this academic stuff. Too much analysis. What ever happened to reading a book because you liked it?
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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?
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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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Change is overrated.
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Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.
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The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.
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The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across a desert sky. The other thing about tears is that they kind of my made my heart hurt.
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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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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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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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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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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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How strange to have a body. Sometimes it felt that way. Strange.
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I didn't know what to do with that piece of information. So I just kept it inside. That's what I did with everything. Kept it inside.
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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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Talking doesn't help everybody. "Not that you'd know." Yeah. Not that I'd know.
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I ask her if she loves me and I always feel bad when I ask her that because it makes me sound so desperate. I ask and ask and ask.