Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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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 have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.
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I didn’t know why I was thinking about all these things—except that’s what I always did. I guess I had my own personal television in my brain. I could control whatever I wanted to watch. I could switch the channels anytime I wanted.
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If you can’t put it into words, then you just don’t know.
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A woman who was not afraid to die was not afraid of anything.
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As I nodded my head to the beat, I started wondering what had gone through Richie Valens’s head before the plane crashed into the unforgiving ground. Hey, Buddy! The music’s over. For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
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Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.
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She was staring at a picture of me and Sam when we were seven. No front teeth. We were standing in the front yard. It was summer and the leaves of her mulberry tree were behind us. The caption read: She was always my sister.
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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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Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.
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I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel ever again.
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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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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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Nobody wants to read happy stories.
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Moms and God generally get along pretty well.
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Bullshit, Ari. You have the harder rule to follow? Buffalo shit. Coyote shit. All you have to do is be loyal to the most brilliant guy you've ever met—which is like walking barefoot through the park. I, on the other hand, have to refrain from kissing the greatest guy in the universe—which is like walking barefoot on hot coals.
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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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Every generation thinks they’re the coolest canoe that’s ever come down the river.
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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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If you don't remember something, it doesn't hurt.
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She thinks that life is crueler and more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
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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. Those words tasted bitter. But the worst part was that those words were living inside me. And they were leaking out of me. Words were not things you could control. Not always.
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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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Maybe I was a little superior. But I don't think I was superior. I just didn't understand how to talk to them, how to be myself around them. Being around other guys didn't make me feel smarter. Being around other guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all part of this club and I wasn't a member.