Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
Were you afraid Dad wouldn’t come back? I didn’t think about it. I made myself not think about it. I’m good at that.
-
Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
-
So if I don’t write as many letters as you do, don’t be upset. I’m not doing it to upset you, okay? This is my problem. I want other people to tell me how they feel. But I’m not so sure I want to return the favor.
-
Letting someone touch you in the place where it hurts the most, if I could do that, if I could just do that, well, that would mean I was alive.
-
I didn’t feel like a man just then. I felt like a five-year-old boy who didn’t want to do anything except play in a pile of leaves. A five-year-old boy with a greedy heart who wanted his grandmother to live forever.
-
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.
-
But the thing is that I’m in love with Rafael’s story. I think I understand when Adam says that all our stories are different but in some ways our stories are all the same. I never really got that. But when I start to read Rafael’s journal, it’s as if I can see myself. It’s better than a mirror.
-
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.
-
Sometimes, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone.
-
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.
-
The storm was fierce. But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my father’s love was fiercer than any storm.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
-
I stared at the reproduced mural in the book--but I was more interested in his finger as he tapped the book with approval. That finger had pulled a trigger in a war. That finger had touched my mother in tender ways I did not fully comprehend. I wanted to talk, to say something, to ask questions. But I couldn't. All the words were stuck in my throat. So I just nodded.
-
I think I’m the stupidest smart boy who ever lived.
-
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.
-
I have this idea stuck in my head that you have to be born beautiful in order to dream beautiful things. God didn't write beautiful on my heart. I'm stuck with all my bad dreams. Bad dreams for bad boys. I guess that's the way it is for me. Look, there's nothing I can do about it.
-
Guess that's a part of what the living did, they took care of their dead.
-
I realized that Sam wasn’t angry at all. She was hurt. At that moment I heard all the hurt she’d ever held. And it seemed to me that the whole house had quieted down to listen to her pain.
-
Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
-
Dreams don't come from nowhere.
-
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.
-
The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.