Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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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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But why? Why don’t I want to fight when fight is all I’ve ever known and loved? I’ve fought for every inch of joy I’ve ever known.
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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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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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You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
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If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.
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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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There was something about the sound of a man in pain that resembled the sound of a wounded animal.
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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
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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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Maybe the problem between me and my father was that we were both the same.
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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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When you do something, you have to know exactly what you're doing.
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I have this storm inside me. It's trying to kill me. I wonder sometimes if that's such a bad thing. I know about storms. I'm tired. I just want to sleep forever. Maybe I should tell the storm to go ahead and kill me.
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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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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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The heart can get really cold if all you've known is winter.
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Sometimes you put things off. And you get addicted to putting things off.
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Maybe this will be the summer when there is nothing but laughter. Maybe this will be the summer.
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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 wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.
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Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.