Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I mean, okay, let's say we're all going to get better. Let's just pretend we will. Fine. Where are we going to go after we get better? What are we going to do with all of our newfound healthy behaviors? Back out into the world that screwed us up and screwed us over. This does not sound promising.
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I want to gather up all the words in the world and write them down on little pieces of paper—then throw them in the air. They would look like tiny sparrows flying toward the sun. Without all those words, the sky would be clear and perfect and blue. The deafening world would be beautiful in all that silence.
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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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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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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 wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
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We think there's a reason for everything, as if life was supposed to make sense. It's not exactly math. People aren't numbers. Everybody knows life doesn't make any sense at all, so we just better deal with the whole mess. Have a beer. Have a cup of coffee. Have a piece of cake. Go out to a movie. Enjoy the Popcorn.
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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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Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.
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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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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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Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it!” I knew I was starting to cry and I was so sick, sick, sick to death of all those sad damned tears I had inside me. How could I have so many tears living there, in my body? How could they fit? When was it going to stop? When?
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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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You’re such a school teacher.
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There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.
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What I wanted to tell her was that I didn’t care about sin or about God. I wanted to tell her that God was just a beautiful idea and I didn’t care about beautiful ideas and that He was just a word I hadn’t run into yet, hadn’t met yet, and so He was still a stranger. I wanted to tell her that she was real, and she was so much more beautiful than an idea.
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That was the way it was in the desert, the rain poured down then stopped. Just like that.
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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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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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Maybe tears were something you caught. Like the flu.
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He drags it out of her, all those feelings she has.
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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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How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?
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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.