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She had a lot of empathy. Maybe that’s why she liked all those bad boys. They were outcasts. It was like she was picking up strays and taking them in. It’s like she could see past their rough exteriors and see the parts of them that hurt. Maybe she thought she could take away the hurt. She was wrong, of course. But I found it hard to fault her for her good heart.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
The world is being run by sober people--and it doesn't look like it's working out all that well.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Andrés Segovia is looking up at the morning sky. Tears are streaming from his eyes. He wants to live in this sun all the days of his life. He is suddenly afraid of spending years and years in prison. Perhaps he deserves to be punished. But in this one second of clarity, he wants to become that old word he heard long ago. Emancipated. He is thinking that he will never be worthy of that word.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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She does not know how to measure her life. When Sam was alive, she measured it through his love. She had always measured herself through the look in his eyes. She is afraid of admitting that to herself.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
And even me who did know them. I—I hated being loved by them. But I couldn’t run. I couldn’t. It is useless to run from a storm. So I stayed. I know about storms as well as anyone.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Like a girl, but a girl who had always been a woman.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
That was the way it was in the desert, the rain poured down then stopped. Just like that.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
The sun flickers. Like a flame hit by a sudden gust of wind. Like the lights of a bomb shelter during an air raid. Even the sun flickers. That’s what she kept telling herself. A gust, a bomb, a small explosion. Then the disruption passed—everything calm again. Everything returning to normalcy. Except that she felt herself trembling. Except she knew that this was the beginning. It was her body that had flickered.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
She retreated to her own desert, prayed and fought with God there.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god.
Benjamin Alire Saenz