Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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Even in his damaged state, he could light up a room. He could fill it with a presence that was large and rare.
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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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All right, so we’re also all fucked up. But hey, you think sober people aren’t all fucked up? 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’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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I don’t know if I believed in the war or not, Ari. I don’t think I did. I think about it a lot. But I signed up. And I don’t know what I felt about this country. I do know that the only country I had were the men that fought side by side. They were my country, Ari. Them. Louie and Beckett and Garcia and Al and Gio—they were my country. I’m not proud of everything I did in that war. I wasn’t always a good soldier. I wasn’t always a good man. War did something to us. To me. To all of us. But the men we left behind. Those are the ones who are in my dreams.
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There was a tear running down his cheek. It seemed like a river in the light of the setting sun.
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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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But how did you freeze a heart, the days and weeks and months that made a life?
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I’d watched them in all their beautiful courage. I’d watched them as they struggled through their hurts and their wounds.
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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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If things could always be the way they were now. If only.
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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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People don't always have to do the right thing for the right reasons—so long as they do the right thing.
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This is my theory: the people who shouldn't hate themselves, do hate themselves. And the people who should hate themselves, don't hate themselves. The world is all backwards. See, this is one of the many reasons why God and I are not good friends.
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Every generation thinks they’re the coolest canoe that’s ever come down the river.
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Your body is nothing but a money machine. That’s the way it is. We’re all just prostitutes.
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Do you know what dead skin looks like when they take off a cast? That was my life, all that dead skin. It was strange to feel like the Ari I used to be. Except that wasn’t totally true. The Ari I used to be didn’t exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn’t exist yet.
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But maybe there isn’t a logic behind the word family. The truth is, it isn’t always such a good word.
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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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There is a randomness to this ballet of death. This is the order of things. This is the secret to understanding the universe. Everything happens in an instant. Normalcy. And then apocalypse.
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I like the old words better. They're like old friends.
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You know what the worst thing about adults is? ...They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.