Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
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Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
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You should just sit them down and make them tell you. Make them be adults.
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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.
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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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. . . Alive is a place. Alive is the new word for home.
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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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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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He looked like a summer morning when he smiled, exactly like a summer morning.
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There are more songs living inside her than there are leaves on her tree.
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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?
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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 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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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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The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
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It was as if she was becoming the light.
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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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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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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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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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He was on fire, she could almost touch the rage. He could scare people. He could make anyone afraid, if he wanted to.