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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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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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 wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
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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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Maybe that's what life was. You zigged and you zagged and zigged and zagged some more.
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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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How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?
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No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
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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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That was the way it was in the desert, the rain poured down then stopped. Just like that.
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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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For a moment, I thought of the word happy and it was a word that just, well, it felt like it was visiting me. I knew it wouldn’t last for very long and I’d be sad again and then it would be worse because it’s one thing to be sad and it’s another thing to be sad once you’ve been happy. Being sad after you’ve been happy is the worst thing in the world.
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I wanted to feel those words in my mouth as I spoke them aloud. Words could be like food—they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something. “My brother is in prison.” Those words tasted bitter.
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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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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 prefer law to war under all circumstances.
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for —W. S. Merwin
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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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There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.
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He drags it out of her, all those feelings she has.
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There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.
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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.