Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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I think I’m the stupidest smart boy who ever lived.
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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.
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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.
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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 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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Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
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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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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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He was on fire, she could almost touch the rage. He could scare people. He could make anyone afraid, if he wanted to.
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I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.
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There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.
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Sometimes, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone.
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You should just sit them down and make them tell you. Make them be adults.
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The storm was fierce. But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my father’s love was fiercer than any storm.
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You can't make anyone be an adult. Especially an adult.
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I think it means that it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.
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Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.
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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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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 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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When you do something, you have to know exactly what you're doing.
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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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My mom, she sometimes resided in the space between irony and sincerity.