Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
That smell—cigarette—it always made me think of him. He smoked his cigarette. I drove. I didn’t mind the silence and the desert and the cloudless sky. What did words matter to a desert?
-
He thought that everyone should listen to her voice, because there was so much sadness and happiness in it, all at the same time. And he knew she could make the world be quiet, and he thought that maybe the world needed to be quiet. That was the problem with the world—it never stayed quiet long enough to listen.
-
The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
-
On the other hand, Uncle Mickey liked to say that everybody deserved a day off from the truth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.
-
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
-
I ask her if she loves me and I always feel bad when I ask her that because it makes me sound so desperate. I ask and ask and ask.
-
I think it means that it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.
-
And why the hell was I thinking this crap while Sam was in the other room with a heart that would never be unwounded again? Maybe her heart would never heal. Maybe the hurt would live in her forever. So why in hell was I thinking such stupid and shallow things?
-
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?
-
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.
-
But why? Why don’t I want to fight when fight is all I’ve ever known and loved? I’ve fought for every inch of joy I’ve ever known.
-
Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much. Maybe the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn't control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could.
-
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.
-
I’m not into all this academic stuff. Too much analysis. What ever happened to reading a book because you liked it?
-
He looked at the stubborn woman standing in front of him, her hair uncombed and wild, her eyes red with tears, her face wounded. In that moment, he thought, she was as beautiful as she had ever been.
-
He looked like a summer morning when he smiled, exactly like a summer morning.
-
Change is overrated.
-
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
-
And like everybody else in the known universe, she didn’t always let herself in on the truth.
-
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.
-
As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.