Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
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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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Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.
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You’re such a school teacher.
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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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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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I don't know what the exact shape of my life will take--and what the days to come will bring--except i know that i am happy and my heart is still. I know that I have fallen in love with the word surrender and know that I can no longer live in disappointment.
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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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She looked like a summer garden.
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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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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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That was the way it was in the desert, the rain poured down then stopped. Just like that.
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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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I don't know. I don't know shit about love. And even though I'm gay, I don't know shit about being gay.
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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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He drags it out of her, all those feelings she has.
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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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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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I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.