Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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It was too hard, too messy, too complicated. I sort of lived in a self-imposed exile for a good many years. I went away to college, lived my own life, chased my dreams, tried to face some demons. I guess I thought I could do all those things on my won. I thought that because I was gay, my family, well, they'd hate me or they wouldn't understand me or they'd send me away. So I just sent myself away. It was easier for me to pretend that I didn't belong to a family. I tried to pretend I didn't belong to anyone
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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.
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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.
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The Sam I knew was never in control of her emotions. But on that day she was wearing dignity. So much more beautiful than pearls.
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My mom, she sometimes resided in the space between irony and sincerity.
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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.
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You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
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I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.
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And like everybody else in the known universe, she didn’t always let herself in on the truth.
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Her eyes were as sad as they were fierce.
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His sadness was unbearable to watch. Far worse than his rage. He looked so defeated in that sorrow—like he was surrendering, like the battle was too much.
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The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
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I wondered if happiness would go away when she died.
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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.
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All my friends thought I was a very happy human being. Because that's how I acted- like a really happy human being. But all that pretending made me tired. If I acted the way I felt, then I doubt my friends would have really hung out with me. So the pretending wasn't all bad. The pretending made me less lonely. But in another was, it made me more lonely because I felt like a fraud. I've always felt like a fake human being.
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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.
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When you do something, you have to know exactly what you're doing.
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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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. . . Alive is a place. Alive is the new word for home.
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..and I thought it was nice that they knew how to talk and how to laugh and how to be in the world.
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I sometimes think that I don't let myself know what I'm really thinking about. That doesn't make much sense but it makes sense to me. I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about—and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.
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People were wired to hell. He wanted to growl like a rabid mastiff when he heard someone say, "The body is a machine." What asshole thought of that? Screwed up and angry and wanting love, fucking desperate to get it and not knowing how to get it, and willing to do anything just to get a taste of it. Or worse, striking out because you couldn't get it-all that love you wanted. The body was not a machine. Machines and computers, he could deal with. There was always a solution for the problem. What was the solution for him?
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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 can't make anyone be an adult. Especially an adult.