Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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Yeah. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
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I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.
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See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.
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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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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 hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where?
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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.
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Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.
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Dante and I were cursed with parents who cared. Why couldn't they just leave us alone? What ever happened to parents who were too busy or too selfish or just didn't give a shit about what their sons did?
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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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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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There's nothing ordinary about you. Nothing ordinary at all.
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And being alone made me want to talk to someone my own age. Someone who understood that using the "f" word wasn't a measure of my lack of imagination. Sometimes using that word just made me feel free.
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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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Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
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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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It didn’t matter that he’d never see her again because she was safe, and she didn’t have to live this kind of life. Her life would be good. She was safe.
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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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I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out.
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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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This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
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The sky was angry and shouting, and it reminded Andrés of how Mando and his father had shouted at each other and had drowned out the sound of love.
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Just because I'm playing on the other team doesn't mean I'm this pathetic human being who's begging to be loved.