Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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.
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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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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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Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
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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 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 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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Nobody wants to read happy stories.
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Tears. They’re like seeds in a watermelon. Good for spitting out.
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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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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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The world is being run by sober people--and it doesn't look like it's working out all that well.
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It would be so effen great if the whole world laughed more- the whole world. I don't mean the kind of laughing that's putting someone down. I mean the kind of laughing that means you've just discovered something really beautiful.
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I thought of what my father had told me one summer day. I’d fallen down, and my knee was all scraped up and bleeding. We sat on the back porch, and he cleaned my wound and put a Band-Aid on it. The sky had cleared after a summer storm. I’d been crying, and he tried to get me to smile. “Your eyes are the color of sky. Did you know that?” I don’t know why I remembered this. Maybe it was because I knew he was telling me he loved me.
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Patience is a gift you have to work for.
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It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.
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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.
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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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I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
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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 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 so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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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 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.