Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
-
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?
-
My mom, she sometimes resided in the space between irony and sincerity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you do something, you have to know exactly what you're doing.
-
You belong everywhere you go. That’s just how you are.
-
It was as if she was becoming the light.
-
I was in love with the innocence of dogs, the purity of their affection. They didn't know enough to hide their feelings. They existed. A dog was a dog. There was such a simple elegance about being a dog that I envied.
-
No one can run from a storm.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else. The really great thing about laughing was that it made me forget about the strange and awful feeling in my legs. Even if it was only for a minute.
-
Maybe the problem between me and my father was that we were both the same.
-
People have parties because they’re sad. They think a party will make them happy.
-
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.
-
Maybe everyone loves differently. Maybe that’s all that matters.
-
I'm trying not to be ashamed...
-
Maybe this will be the summer when there is nothing but laughter. Maybe this will be the summer.
-
Maybe that wasn't logical, but maybe the thing we call logic is overrated.
-
..and I thought it was nice that they knew how to talk and how to laugh and how to be in the world.