Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.
-
Right then I witnessed the world they lived in go completely silent. The world was flooding with their tears.
-
Scars. A sign that you've been hurt. A sign that you have been healed. Had I been hurt? Had I been healed? Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.
-
The thing is I love my dad. My mom too. And I keep wondering what they're going to say when I tell them that someday I want to marry a boy. I wonder how that's going to go over? i'm the only son. What's going to happen with the grandchildren thing? I hat that I'm going to disappoint them, Ari. I know I've disappointed you too.
-
Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.
-
She was hard as stone. And I hated her. I think I still hate her. Though in between then and now, I loved her. I would have done anything for her. And I did. I did everything she asked.
-
Our parents are really weird. Because they love us? That’s not so weird. It’s how they love us that’s weird.
-
He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.
-
When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad's bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.
-
A girl is like a tree? Yeah, and a guy is about as smart as a piece of dead wood infested with termites.
-
I fell in love with the thunder.
-
So what if sometimes Sam was an emotional exhibitionist, going up and down all the time? She could be a storm. But she could be a soft candle lighting up a dark room. So what if she made me a little crazy? All of it—all her emotional stuff, her ever-changing moods and tones of voice—it made her seem so incredibly alive.
-
I knew I’d gone crazy but I couldn’t explain it to myself. Maybe that’s what happens when you go crazy. You just can’t explain it. Not to yourself. Not to anyone. And the worst part about going crazy is that when you’re not crazy anymore, you just don’t know what to think of yourself.
-
I thought of what my father had told me one summer day. I’d fallen down, and my knee was all scraped up and bleeding. We sat on the back porch, and he cleaned my wound and put a Band-Aid on it. The sky had cleared after a summer storm. I’d been crying, and he tried to get me to smile. “Your eyes are the color of sky. Did you know that?” I don’t know why I remembered this. Maybe it was because I knew he was telling me he loved me.
-
Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings.
-
See, the thing about guys is that I didn't really care to be around them. I mean, guys really made me uncomfortable. I don't know why, not exactly. I just, I don't know, I just didn't belong. I think it embarrassed the hell out of me that I was a guy. And it really depressed me that there was the distinct possibility that I was going to grow up and be like one of those assholes.
-
Had a theory that everyone has a relationship with words—whether they know it or not. It’s just that everybody’s relationship with words is different.
-
I closed my eyes and let the water rush over me and I wondered what it would be like to be as soft as water, to make people clean, to quench people's thirst. That would be a beautiful thing, to be like water.
-
I felt alone, but not in a bad way. I really liked being alone. Maybe I liked it too much.
-
Sam had once told him that the shape of the human heart changed every time it loved someone.
-
Sometimes when people talk, they don't always tell the truth.
-
I felt like I was the saddest boy in the universe. Summer had come and gone. Summer had come and gone. And the world was ending.
-
They looked at each other. Like they knew everything about each other. Like that. But what exactly did they know, these strangers who were so familiar and intimate? You fought a war with someone, and you knew them. But you only knew the part that was in the war, the part that knew how to fight. The other part, the pedestrian part that lived in the endless calmness of days, you didn’t know that part.
-
And then Fito sort of hung his head and he was blinking his eyes, like he was trying to blink away all the tears that he’d held inside all his life.