Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Our parents are really weird. Because they love us? That’s not so weird. It’s how they love us that’s weird.
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And then everyone in the room started laughing. My dad and my uncles and aunts - if there's one thing they knew how to do, it was laugh. My dad called that sort of behaviour whistling in the dark. Well, I guess that when you found yourself in the dark, you might as well whistle. It wasn't always going to be morning , and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn't whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up.
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He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.
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If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.
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He looked tired but at that moment, as we sat at the kitchen table, there was something young about him. And I thought that maybe he was changing into someone else. Everyone was always becoming someone else.
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Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.
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Don’t, amor. Te adoro. I’ve already lost a son. I’m not going to lose another. You’re not alone, Ari. I know it feels that way. But you’re not.” “How can you love me so much?” “How could I not love you? You’re the most beautiful boy in the world.
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Dad read the sports page. My theory was that he kept up with the sports world in order to be able to have a decent conversation with his brothers—that was the way he loved them.
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We are all collateral damage for someone's beautiful Ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of the onslaught.
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The whole world seemed to be quiet and calm and I wanted to be the world and feel like that.
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That was the day that my brother was in our house again. In a strange and inexplicable way, my brother had come home.
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He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.
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When something gets broken, it can be fixed.
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All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.
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I guess that was going to be my new thing. I couldn't exactly storm away in anger. I'd just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.
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For no reason at all, he thought that she looked like a nun. The beautiful kind. The kind that gave and gave because that’s what they knew how to do. And the giving made them more beautiful.
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Nothing. It’s just that most smart people are perfect shits.
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Scars. A sign that you've been hurt. A sign that you have been healed. Had I been hurt? Had I been healed? Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
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Have you noticed that some people don't give A damn and just keep on shopping?
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The thing is I love my dad. My mom too. And I keep wondering what they're going to say when I tell them that someday I want to marry a boy. I wonder how that's going to go over? i'm the only son. What's going to happen with the grandchildren thing? I hat that I'm going to disappoint them, Ari. I know I've disappointed you too.
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So what if sometimes Sam was an emotional exhibitionist, going up and down all the time? She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room. So what if she made me a little crazy? All of it—all her emotional stuff, her ever-changing moods and tones of voice—it made her seem so incredibly alive.
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His shoes on the front porch before he came inside. The Japanese do that. They don’t bring the dirt of the world into another person’s house.
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On the outside, he was back to his old self. Only, I knew there was a wound living inside him, and that wound wasn’t going away anytime soon.
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Sometimes I think my father has all these scars. On his heart. In his head. All over. It’s not such an easy thing to be the son of a man who’s been to war.