Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
-
The world is being run by sober people--and it doesn't look like it's working out all that well.
-
I’ve expanded my vocabulary.” I nudged him. “I’m preparing for college.” “How many new words a day?” “You know, a few. I like the old words better. They’re like old friends.
-
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.
-
Why did people think they could be alone? Everyone you loved or hated or touched or who made you tremble or bruised you—they were always there, ready to enter and take over the room. It didn’t matter at all if you opened the door or not. They came rushing in. They knew the way, knew how to make themselves at home.
-
He was funny and focused and fierce. I mean the guy could be fierce. And there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you.
-
Some people have dogs. Not me. I have a therapist. His name is Adam. Some people think it's all very cool to have a therapist. Me, I'm not into this. Will somebody please just give me a dog?
-
Ad we interviewing each other? Something like that. What position am I applying for? Best friend. I thought I already had the job. Don't be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.
-
Talking is fantastically overrated. Too many people do too much of it. It stuns the hell out of me how so many people like to talk. Sharkey, for example. If talking is so good for you, what the hell is Sharkey doing here? The guy tears me up. Talking does not heal you. Talking just adds to the noise pollution in the world. If we were really serious about going green, then maybe we’d all just be quiet.
-
I hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where?
-
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.
-
Young men and women come of age when they look at their parents and see them not only as their parents but as people. They gain a lot of compassion, and it's easier to accept their flaws.
-
I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.
-
You know what I think, Ari? I think Mexicans don’t like me.
-
I mean, okay, let's say we're all going to get better. Let's just pretend we will. Fine. Where are we going to go after we get better? What are we going to do with all of our newfound healthy behaviors? Back out into the world that screwed us up and screwed us over. This does not sound promising.
-
I hated living in the small and claustrophobic atmosphere of my house. It didn’t feel like home anymore. I felt like an unwanted guest.
-
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Yeah, that was a good song. My theme song. But really I thought it was everybody’s theme song.
-
There are days when I almost forget that I fought in that war. It was such a long time ago. I was young, so young, so fucking young. And all that's left of my youth is in my head. You know, the head, it's like a map. Not a map that gives you directions, but a map with names on it–names of guys who were killed in the war, names of the people you left behind, names of countries and villages and cities. Names. After all these years, that's all that's left. Names. But no directions. And no way to reach them, no way to get back what you lost.
-
All the hovering angels were gone. He thought maybe there had been a funeral. Someone had died. Everything was black—the sky, the clothes he was wearing, his heart.
-
If summer was a book then I was going to write something beautiful in it. In my own handwriting. But I had no idea what to write.
-
I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
-
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.
-
Maybe my dad just didn't need words to get by in the world. I wasn't like that. Well, I was like that on the outside, pretending not to need words. But I wasn't like that on the inside. I'd figured something out about myself: on the inside, I wasn't like my dad at all. On the inside I was more like Dante. That really scared me.
-
I'm an ex-Catholic priest. I have such a complex relationship to Catholicism. On the one hand, if I called myself a Catholic it would have to be a very unorthodox one, as I just don't believe all of the teachings of the Church. But on the other hand, I'm an educated man because the Catholic Church educated me. It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can't talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?