Quotes by 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 didnt help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.

All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didnt like sad.

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

Dad? Dad, no. No. I cant. I cant. Why are you saying these things?Because I cant stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.

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.

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.

I hadnt even solved the mystery of my own body.

What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. Its just simple logic.

And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?

..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didnt want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasnt interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I couldnt exactly storm away in anger. Id just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.

See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else - sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as youre not making someone bleed.

I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.

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.

The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.

I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.