Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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.
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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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You should just sit them down and make them tell you. Make them be adults.
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Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
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If there’s no heaven, I don’t really care. Maybe people are heaven, Dad. Some people, anyway. You and Sam and Fito. Maybe you’re all heaven. Maybe everyone’s heaven, and we just don’t know it.
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The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
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. . . Alive is a place. Alive is the new word for home.
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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’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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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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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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I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.
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He looked so happy and I wondered about that, his capacity for happiness. Where did that come from? Did I have that kind of happiness inside me? Was I just afraid of it?
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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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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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There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.
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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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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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It was as if she was becoming the light.
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Maybe the problem between me and my father was that we were both the same.
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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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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.
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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.