Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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.
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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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Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal? Is that something I should aspire to?
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Nobody wants to read happy stories.
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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.
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I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.
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He’s like a sunflower, Grace. He leans into me as if I were the source of all light.
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Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that.
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I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
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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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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 day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop. I knew that a part of him would never be the same. They cracked more than his ribs.
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He didn’t know anything about hummingbirds except that his father had told him that they liked to fight. So maybe you could like to fight and still be beautiful, like the hummingbirds.
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For a moment, I thought of the word happy and it was a word that just, well, it felt like it was visiting me. I knew it wouldn’t last for very long and I’d be sad again and then it would be worse because it’s one thing to be sad and it’s another thing to be sad once you’ve been happy. Being sad after you’ve been happy is the worst thing in the world.
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I hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where?
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See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.
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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.
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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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Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.
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Daughters. They were sometimes as familiar and intimate as honeysuckles in bloom, but mostly daughters were mysteries. They lived in rooms you had long since abandoned and could not, did not, ever want to reenter.
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I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
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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?
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I watched her and her Aunt Lina stare at each other for what seemed a long time. Something was being said. Something important. Something that had to be said without words.
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People don't always have to do the right thing for the right reasons—so long as they do the right thing.