Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
-
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.
-
We don’t always do the right things, you know? We don’t always say the right things.
-
Tears. They’re like seeds in a watermelon. Good for spitting out.
-
I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
-
You know what I think, Ari? I think Mexicans don’t like me.
-
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.
-
She retreated to her own desert, prayed and fought with God there.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes “happy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “sad” and on some people’s hearts he writes “crazy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “genius” and on some people’s hearts he writes “angry” and on some people’s hearts he writes “winner” and on some people’s hearts he writes “loser.” I keep seeing a newspaper being tossed around in the wind. And then a strong gust comes along and the newspaper is thrown against a barbed wire fence and it gets ripped to shreds in an instant. That’s how I feel. I think God is the wind. It’s all like a game to him. Him. God. And it’s all pretty much random. He takes out his pen and starts writing on our blank hearts. When it came to my turn, he wrote “sad.” I don’t like God very much. Apparently, he doesn’t like me very much either.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
In transition? What kind of a Mexican mother are you? I’m an educated woman. That doesn’t un-Mexicanize me, Ari.