Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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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He said I was too sad a nd that some day I wouldn't be sad anymore – and maybe then I would let someone love me.
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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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Every generation thinks they’re the coolest canoe that’s ever come down the river.
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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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I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.
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But how did you freeze a heart, the days and weeks and months that made a life?
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I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
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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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She looked like a summer garden.
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You’re such a school teacher.
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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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I've learned a few things about ugly memories--they shoot through the heart like a bullet that maims and disfigures. A bullet that doesn't have the decency to kill.
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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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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 started crying. Dante and his tears. Dante and his tears. You pushed me. You pushed me and you saved my life.
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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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He’s so cute I would have thrown myself in front of a moving car too.
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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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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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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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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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Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.
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I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.