Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Love is work, amor. It's not something that just happens.
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Sometimes parents loved their sons so much that they made a romance out of their lives. They thought our youth could help us overcome everything. Maybe moms and dads forgot about this one small fact: being on the verge of seventeen could be harsh and painful and confusing. Being on the verge of seventeen could really suck.
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It all happened in an instant, like a flash of lightning, only the lightning wasn’t coming from the sky, it was coming from somewhere inside of me.
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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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At twelve, he was very much still a child. Some boys were already on their way to becoming men at twelve. But not this boy, perhaps the most beautiful boy he has ever seen. He is as sad as he is beautiful. He wants to hold Andrés in his arms and tell him no harm will come to him. But he knows that harm has already come. He hopes it has not come to stay.
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There I was. Sitting in my car. In the rain. Talking to Alejandra. And it felt more like home than the place where I slept.
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He looked like a summer morning when he smiled, exactly like a summer morning.
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Maybe the river was made of our tears. Mine and Sam’s. Maybe the river was made of everybody’s tears. Everybody who had ever lost anybody. All those tears.
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He hoped the dead couldn’t see the living. He hoped his mother couldn’t see what was happening to them. She didn’t deserve to see this.
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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, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone.
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The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them.
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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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I think it means that it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.
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The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.
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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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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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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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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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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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He looked so happy and I wondered about that, his capacity for happiness. Where did that come from? Did I have that kind of happiness inside me? Was I just afraid of it?
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Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
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Love is a storm that twists and mangles us. If you love—if you really love—if you have that kind of heart—then you know. (And if you don’t, there is no explaining.) The storm comes from within. There is nothing you can do to prepare.
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I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.