Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
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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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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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You know, it was beautiful to be in that kitchen just then. I guess there are times of quiet beauty in life.
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I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
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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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I wanted to tell him that all the awful things that happened in the old world were dead. And the new world, the world we lived in now, the world we were creating, that world would be better. But I didn’t say it, because I wasn’t sure it was true.
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Sam, she was smart as hell. And she knew stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. She also felt stuff. Oh, man, could Sam feel. Sometimes I thought she was doing all the thinking, all the feeling, and all the living for both of us.
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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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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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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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I think I’m the stupidest smart boy who ever lived.
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It was like letting go of the sky.
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Guess that's a part of what the living did, they took care of their dead.
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The world had changed. And this new world was quiet and sad.
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He looked like a summer morning when he smiled, exactly like a summer morning.
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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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There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.
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There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal.
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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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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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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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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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I thought of what my mom had said. "You talk like a man." It was easier to talk like a man than to be one.