Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I wanted to tell her that I thought she had a beautiful heart.
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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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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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The world had changed. And this new world was quiet and sad.
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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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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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The hurt means you loved someone. That you really loved someone.
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Dreams don't come from nowhere.
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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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I didn't think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.
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There was so little difference between a fist that was trying to hold everything in and the fist that was ready to release all its frustration and rage.
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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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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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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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Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.
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Her eyes were as sad as they were fierce.
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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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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 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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Maybe it had to be that way. Maybe she’d had to fight for everything, so the fight in her was permanent—like a scar or an immutable tattoo.
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. . . Alive is a place. Alive is the new word for home.
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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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My mom, she sometimes resided in the space between irony and sincerity.
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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.