Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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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.
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I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
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I wanted to feel those words in my mouth as I spoke them aloud. Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something. Those words tasted bitter. But the worst part was that those words were living inside me. And they were leaking out of me. Words were not things you could control. Not always.
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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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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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Why do you like to cuss? Everybody likes to cuss. I don’t. They don’t call you Mr. Excitement for nothing.
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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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Sometimes, I see myself standing on a beach, my bare feet buried in the wet sand. And there’s no one on the beach, just me, but I don’t feel alone. What I feel is alive. And it seems like the whole world belongs to me. The cool breeze whistles through my hair, and something tells me I have heard that song all my life. I’m watching the waves hit the sand, the ebb and flow of the waves crashing against the distant cliffs. The ocean is ever moving—and yet there is a stillness that I envy.
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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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Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that.
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Nobody wants to read happy stories.
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I knew what he was saying, and I wished to God he was someone else, someone who didn't have to say things out loud.
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I'm an ex-Catholic priest. I have such a complex relationship to Catholicism. On the one hand, if I called myself a Catholic it would have to be a very unorthodox one, as I just don't believe all of the teachings of the Church. But on the other hand, I'm an educated man because the Catholic Church educated me. It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can't talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?
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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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A guy who loves his truck needs other people to admire his driving machine. Yeah, needs. That's the truth. I don't know why, but that's the way truck guys are.
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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.
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Because he said it as if he was the first human being who'd ever noticed. Maybe that's why so many people trusted him, because he had something in his voice, because he was well-spoken and had learned to modulate his speech-just so-and somehow, with that calm and controlled voice, he managed to rearrange the chaos of the world in such a way as to make it appear as if there really were a plan.
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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.
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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.
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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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See, I think there are roads that lead us to each other. But in my family, there were no roads - just underground tunnels. I think we all got lost in those underground tunnels. No, not lost. We just lived there.
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I can see that his heart is really numb. The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter. I can see that his heart is really numb. The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.
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I never ask him anything about the war. I guess it’s something he has to keep to himself. Maybe it’s a terrible thing, to keep a war to yourself. But maybe that’s the way it has to be.