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 was on fire, she could almost touch the rage. He could scare people. He could make anyone afraid, if he wanted to.
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You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
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My father nodded. Ari, the problem isn't just that Dante's in love with you. The real problem--for you anyway--is that you're in love with him.
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Guess that's a part of what the living did, they took care of their dead.
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People were wired to hell. He wanted to growl like a rabid mastiff when he heard someone say, "The body is a machine." What asshole thought of that? Screwed up and angry and wanting love, fucking desperate to get it and not knowing how to get it, and willing to do anything just to get a taste of it. Or worse, striking out because you couldn't get it-all that love you wanted. The body was not a machine. Machines and computers, he could deal with. There was always a solution for the problem. What was the solution for him?
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Dreams don't come from nowhere.
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I let him be. Sometimes you have to let people have their own space—even when you are in the same room with them. He taught me that, my dad. He taught me almost everything I know.
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And understood that rage could be quiet. Could be soft. Rage didn’t have to be a killer.
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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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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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..and I thought it was nice that they knew how to talk and how to laugh and how to be in the world.
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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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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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It was like letting go of the sky.
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I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
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Maybe the problem between me and my father was that we were both the same.
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Still as death, and Andrés felt as if it were up to him to make noise so that his sister would know they were still alive.
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There was so little difference between a fist that was trying to hold everything in and the fist that was ready to release all its frustration and rage.
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Talking doesn't help everybody. "Not that you'd know." Yeah. Not that I'd know.
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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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She had all this love in her eyes, and I swear I could drown in that love.
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And he wished her anger would come back because she was strong when she was angry.
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But the thing is that I’m in love with Rafael’s story. I think I understand when Adam says that all our stories are different but in some ways our stories are all the same. I never really got that. But when I start to read Rafael’s journal, it’s as if I can see myself. It’s better than a mirror.