Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
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Maybe all that silence about my brother did something to me. I think it did. Not talking can make a guy pretty lonely.
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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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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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I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel ever again.
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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 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.
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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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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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Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal? Is that something I should aspire to?
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It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again. If you didn’t whistle, the quiet and the dark would swallow you up. The thing is, I didn’t know how to whistle. I guessed I was going to have to learn.
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I like the old words better. They're like old friends.
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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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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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I knew that even though he was way into mood-altering substances and he had this really bad temper that there was something really beautiful inside him. Just because no one else could see it didn't mean it wasn't there.
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Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can't pretend it isn't there.
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Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?