Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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He got out of the car. He stood out in the heat. I knew he was trying to organize himself. Like a messy room that needed to be cleaned up. I left him alone for a while. But then, I decided I wanted to be with him. I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
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I always thought of men as being hard—maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn’t. I don’t know where he’d learned it, but it wasn’t something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn’t. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn’t know which one of us had it worse.
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She stores so many of his words in her head that she feels as if she has become nothing more than a book he has written.
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There are pieces of paper scattered everywhere on the floor of my brain.
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We don’t always do the right things, you know? We don’t always say the right things.
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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.
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If you can’t put it into words, then you just don’t know.
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She retreated to her own desert, prayed and fought with God there.
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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.
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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.
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We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about "the American family." The right wing has this thing - Focus on the Family. What the hell is that? I don't want to just discuss the issues - I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don't like to write things that feel like issue books.
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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.
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You know what I think, Ari? I think Mexicans don’t like me.
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He looked like an angel. And all I wanted to do was put my fist through his jaw. I couldn't stand my own cruelty.
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Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
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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.
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Tears. They’re like seeds in a watermelon. Good for spitting out.
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Maybe the difference between being a boy and being a man is that boys couldn’t control the awful things they sometimes felt. And men could. That afternoon, I was just a boy. Not even close to being a man.
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He started crying. Dante and his tears. Dante and his tears. You pushed me. You pushed me and you saved my life.
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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.
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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.
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And then my dad was there. He and my brother stared at each other and I couldn’t stand the look on their faces, because it seemed like there was the hurt of all the sons and all the fathers of the world. And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.
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The world is being run by sober people--and it doesn't look like it's working out all that well.
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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.