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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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
We don’t always do the right things, you know? We don’t always say the right things.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Because when you do something, you have to know exactly what you're doing. No one knows exactly what they're doing. That's because people are lazy and undisciplined.
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 -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Like a girl, but a girl who had always been a woman.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal? Is that something I should aspire to?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
That was the way it was in the desert, the rain poured down then stopped. Just like that.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I watched her from the doorway. I wondered how it was that she came to be the owner of that rage. I wanted it for myself but there was nothing in me.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
He’s like a sunflower, Grace. He leans into me as if I were the source of all light.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Tears. They’re like seeds in a watermelon. Good for spitting out.
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 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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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 -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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In transition? What kind of a Mexican mother are you? I’m an educated woman. That doesn’t un-Mexicanize me, Ari.
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 -
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 -
You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
Benjamin Alire Saenz