Benjamin Alire Sáenz Quotes

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Rafael?””Yeah?”„Do we all have monsters?”„Yes.”„Why does God give us so many monsters?”„You want to know my theory?”„Sure.”„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose.Drinking and smoking over and overWhat's so great about a life that's sober?There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.I'm tired of searching for words in the sky.All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being youngWhen the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I think you love him more than you can bear.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Ad we interviewing each other?Something like that.What position am I applying for?Best friend.I thought I already had the job.Don't be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Maybe all that silence about my brother did something to me. I think it did. Not talking can make a guy pretty lonely

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn't even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people let everyone in and let themselves be stepped all over. This equals unhealthy.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Feeling sorry for myself was an art.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Do you think it will always be this way?”“What?”“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes happy and on some people’s hearts he writes sad and on some people’s hearts he writes crazy and on some people’s hearts he writes genius and on some people’s hearts he writes angry and on some people’s hearts he writes winner and on some people’s hearts he writes loser.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I wish I didn’t have a heart that God wrote Sad on.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I always thought of men as being hard—maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn’t. I don’t know where he’d learned it, but it wasn’t something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn’t. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn’t know which one of us had it worse

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

So I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah I had all kinds of reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

~ Benjamin Alire Sáenz