Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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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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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 had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.
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We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
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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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He’d run and run until his heart burst into flames. And he would become nothing but ash. No body, no heart, no bone, no flesh—just carbon matter scattering in the wind.
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People talk to dogs. Not that they understand. But maybe they understand enough.
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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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I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I really liked being alone. Maybe I liked it too much.
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She was hard as stone. And I hated her. I think I still hate her. Though in between then and now, I loved her. I would have done anything for her. And I did. I did everything she asked.
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Your pain’s become the only light you know. You want to punish yourself. You think your life has to be a tragedy.
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Sometimes when people talk, they don't always tell the truth.
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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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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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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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But he didn’t know exactly where the worry was coming from. He just had a feeling. Like thunder in the sky. Only the thunder was in his stomach. There would be a storm.
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That’s how she loved people—by feeding them.
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You are what you remember.
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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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A girl is like a tree? Yeah, and a guy is about as smart as a piece of dead wood infested with termites.
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I don't like remembering. Remembering makes me feel things. I don't like to feel things. I'm thinking I could spend the rest of my life becoming an expert at forgetting
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I knew I’d gone crazy but I couldn’t explain it to myself. Maybe that’s what happens when you go crazy. You just can’t explain it. Not to yourself. Not to anyone. And the worst part about going crazy is that when you’re not crazy anymore, you just don’t know what to think of yourself.
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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.