Top 100 Alire Saenz Quotes
#1. I hated God for giving me a heart. What good were they? Hearts? Having one got me exactly where?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#3. I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#4. Nd then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#5. 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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#6. Like an animal. As if people weren't animals. She tried to put a face on him. His eyes would betray the chaos of his heart, the riots that were exploding everywhere inside him. His eyes would be so black that they would shine blue in the sun.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#7. He'd run and run until his heart burst into flames. And he would become nothing but ash. No body, no heart, no bone, no flesh - just carbon matter scattering in the wind.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#9. My father nodded. 'Ari, the problem isn't just that Dante's in love with you. The real problem
for you anyway
is that you're in love with him.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#10. Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart? I wondered if there was a way to keep her in this world forever.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#11. Just like that - in one apocalyptic moment - simple and beautiful. A birth. But also a kind of death. Like lightning in a storm. In one flash of light, the whole desert was lit, and you could see the universe. That's what she had seen - the universe in the hands of a child feeling the face of a man.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#12. 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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#13. Maybe it had to be that way. Maybe she'd had to fight for everything, so the fight in her was permanent - like a scar or an immutable tattoo.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#15. I'll tell you a secret. I'm not responsible for whether my students care or don't care. That care has to come from them - not me." "Where does that leave you?" "No matter what, Ari, my job is to care." "Even when they don't?" "Even when they don't." "No matter what?" "No matter what.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#16. And I thought that maybe there were ghosts inside of me that I hadn't even met yet. They were there. Lying in wait.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#17. And even me who did know them. I - I hated being loved by them. But I couldn't run. I couldn't. It is useless to run from a storm. So I stayed. I know about storms as well as anyone.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#20. As far as I was concerned, the sun could have melted the blue right off the sky. Then the sky could be as miserable as I was.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#21. What if hummingbirds lost their wings? We had twenty-four hours to come back with an answer, and it took her precisely ten hours and seven minutes to text me back: Then it would rain for days and the world would know the rage of the grieving sky.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#22. It would be so effen great if the whole world laughed more- the whole world. I don't mean the kind of laughing that's putting someone down. I mean the kind of laughing that means you've just discovered something really beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#24. That was the first time that I really saw my mother as a person. A person who was so much more than just my mother. It was strange to think of her that way.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#26. I realized that Sam wasn't angry at all. She was hurt. At that moment I heard all the hurt she'd ever held. And it seemed to me that the whole house had quieted down to listen to her pain.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#27. The storm was fierce. But I wasn't afraid. I knew my father's love was fiercer than any storm.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#29. 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 Saenz
#30. Listen, the road to happiness is a long fucking road trip. You can't take
The freeway. Back roads, buddy, that's all you got. Unpaved back roads
And bad weather. Storms, baby. Don't expect to get there fast.
And don't expect yourself or your car to arrive in mint condition.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#31. Maybe it's a terrible thing, to keep a war to yourself. But maybe that's the way it has to be.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#32. She wrapped her hands around my face and looked into my eyes. Her hands were old, but they were the softest, kindest hands that had ever touched me. She didn't say anything. She just smiled.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#33. I don't mind working. And anyway, what would I do? I don't like to watch TV. I'm out of touch with my own generation. And I have you and Mom to thank for that.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#37. 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 Saenz
#38. Will you teach me how to paint?"
"Just paint."
"I'm not any good."
"Do it for therapy. You can go to art school later.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#39. But the thing is that I'm in love with Rafael's story. I think I understand when Adam says that all our stories are different but in some ways our stories are all the same. I never really got that. But when I start to read Rafael's journal, it's as if I can see myself. It's better than a mirror.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#41. I noticed his smile was a little sad. Maybe everyone was a little sad. Maybe so.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#43. I'd rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#44. 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 Saenz
#45. Words exist only in theory. And then one ordinary day you run into a word that exists only in theory. And you meet it face to face. And then that word becomes someone you know. That word becomes someone you hate. And you take that word with you wherever you go. And you can't pretend it isn't there.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#46. I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#47. 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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#48. Letting someone touch you in the place where it hurts the most, if I could do that, if I could just do that, well, that would mean I was alive.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#49. I'll always remember that look on your face. You saw me. You've always seen me. And I think that's all that anyone wants. That's why Fito loves coming over here. He's been invisible all his life. And all of a sudden he's visible. Seeing someone. Really seeing someone. That's love.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#50. On the outside, he was back to his old self. Only, I knew there was a wound living inside him, and that wound wasn't going away anytime soon.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#51. You fight yourself, Zach. And you keep fighting yourself. And it's killing you because you're fighting the best part of yourself.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#52. There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#54. I thought of what my mom had said. "You talk like a man." It was easier to talk like a man than to be one.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#57. Sometimes heaven was feeling nothing. Maybe being drunk was a little like dying and going to heaven. Like living in the light. He kept thinking of Ileana. She was eight now.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#58. And then everyone in the room started laughing. My dad and my uncles and aunts - if there's one thing they knew how to do, it was laugh. My dad called that sort of behavior whistling in the dark.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#60. He didn't know anyone could cry like that. A wind was coming from inside her.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#62. I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#63. And understood that rage could be quiet. Could be soft. Rage didn't have to be a killer.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#64. Talking just adds to the noise pollution in the world. If we were really serious about going green, then maybe we'd all just be quiet.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#65. 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 Saenz
#66. You know, the thing about not talking very much is that people think you're mature. They make things up about you.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#67. Maybe life was just a series of phases - one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I'd be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#68. I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#69. He's like a sunflower, Grace. He leans into me as if I were the source of all light.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#70. I wished it was raining," he said.
"I don't need the rain," I said. "I need you.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#72. I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#73. I don't like remembering. Remembering makes me feel things. I don't like feeling things.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#74. I wanted to tell him that all the awful things that happened in the old world were dead. And the new world, the world we lived in now, the world we were creating, that world would be better. But I didn't say it, because I wasn't sure it was true.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#75. The truth is, Ari, I miss El Paso. When we first moved there, I hated it. But now I think about El Paso all the time. And I think of you. Always, Dante P.S.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#78. You don't deserve this, Brian. I wanted to shove that phrase into his heart. But I knew he'd always believe that he did deserve what he got.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#79. That was how she said goodbye to the world. To the people she loved. She was going to leave this earth the same way her mother had. With all the grace of the old world. The old, dying world.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#80. A guy who loves his truck needs other people to admire his driving machine. Yeah, needs. That's the truth. I don't know why, but that's the way truck guys are.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#82. God, his heart could be loud sometimes, loud as if it had its own will, its own logic, its own voice.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#83. I think sometimes our minds get so full of something that we just have to empty them out.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#84. What do you love, Ari? What do you really love?"
"I love the desert. God, I love the desert."
"It's so lonely."
"Is it?"
Dante didn't understand. I was unknowable.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#85. The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#86. 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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#88. The funny thing is, I sometimes think my mother loves my father more than he loves her. Does that make sense?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Maybe. Is love a contest?"
"What does that mean?"
"Maybe everyone loves differently. Maybe that's all that matters.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#89. You know what the worst thing about adults is?"
"No."
"They're not always adults. But that's what I like about them.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#90. 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 Saenz
#91. The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#92. I couldn't exactly storm away in anger. I'd just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#93. Did the thought ever occur to you that I might care about you? People are allowed to care about each other."
"You don't know me well enough to care about me."
"Let me clue you in on something, Andres. Just because you hate yourself doesn't mean that I have to hate you.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#95. I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#97. If you want to be a writer, you don't want to live in a comfortable place.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#98. I wasn't big on family gatherings. Too many intimate strangers. I smiled a lot, but really I never knew what to say.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#100. I was darker than he was. And I'm not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. "That's why you like Spider-Man.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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