Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I lived in pain because I chose to live in pain. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with the idea of tragedy, the idea that I was destined to live a tragic life. I had this romantic idea about the life of a writer and what he was supposed to suffer. Somehow I made my own pain a kind of god.
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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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I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn't even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism.
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It was like she understood something about me that she'd never quite understood before. I always felt that when she looked at me, she was trying to find me, trying to find out who I was. But it seemed at that moment that she saw me, that she knew me. But that confused me.
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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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I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.
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If you can’t put it into words, then you just don’t know.
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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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She does not know how to measure her life. When Sam was alive, she measured it through his love. She had always measured herself through the look in his eyes. She is afraid of admitting that to herself.
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And everything in the world that mattered was in the happy stories Andrés was telling. And everything in the world was Ileana listening to the brother she loved. And everything in the world was waiting.
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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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We lived in the same house. That much was true enough. But mostly we lived in our own particular and peculiar bodies. Bodies we didn't choose. We hear, we see, we smell, we feel with our eyes and noses, ears and hands. We have minds. We have hearts. We have mouths and tongues. That is all we have. That is the only way we know anything--the the smallness of our own insignificant bodies. And so we remain separate, residents of our own small, separate countries.
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When I looked through the telescope, Dante began explaining what I was looking at. I didn’t hear a word. Something happened inside me as I looked out into the vast universe. Through that telescope, the world was closer and larger than I’d ever imagined. And it was all so beautiful and overwhelming and—I don’t know—it made me aware that there was something inside of me that mattered.
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I was trying to explain to myself why I was so happy. I hadn't ever felt this happy. I finally understood something about life and its inexplicable logic. I'd wanted to be certain of everything, and life was never going to give me any certitude. I thought of Fito, who always lived in hope when life had offered him no hope. Certitude was a luxury he had never been able to afford. All he'd ever had was a heart incapable of despair.
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Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.
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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’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it. A lousy piece of paper. That’s me. A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
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I prefer law to war under all circumstances.
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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 watched her hands as they worked the batter over with a wooden spoon. I wanted to kiss them.
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But my father, the man who was in my room and had turned on the light, he’d raised me. He’d tamed me with all the love that lived inside him.
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You don't deserve this, Brian." I wanted to shove that phrase into his heart. But I knew he'd always believe that he did deserve what he got.
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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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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.