Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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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 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.
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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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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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If things could always be the way they were now. If only.
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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.
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Mom had told me about that—she called it a dangerous light. It’s beautiful to look at, but it blinds people, she said, that kind of light. It’s not good to be out in it.
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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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Maybe tears were something you caught. Like the flu.
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She sounded a little angry. I loved her anger and wished I had more of it. Her anger was different than mine or my father’s. Her anger didn’t paralyze her.
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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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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 like the old words better. They're like old friends.
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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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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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I liked watching them, all three of them around my truck. I wanted time to stop because everything seemed so simple, Dante and Legs falling in love with each other, Dante's mom and dad remembering something about their youth as they examined my truck, and me, the proud owner. I had something of value– even if it was just a truck that brought out a sweet nostalgia in people. It was as if my eyes were a camera and I was photographing the moment, knowing that I would keep that photograph forever.
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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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Maybe that's what life was. You zigged and you zagged and zigged and zagged some more.
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God, I was beginning to hate this hope inside me. Sometimes, hope kept you from seeing the truth. Sometimes hope made you keep holding on to something that you should let go of.
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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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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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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.