Home > Author > Benjamin Alire Sáenz
21 " 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 , Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Aristotle and Dante, #1)
22 " 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
23 " 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. "
24 " 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. "
25 " Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something. "
26 " 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 Sáenz , The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
27 " We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost. "
28 " 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 , Last Night I Sang to the Monster
29 " 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. "
30 " I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that. "
31 " Feeling sorry for myself was an art. "
32 " 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. "
33 " 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. "
34 " The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea. "
35 " Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that? "
36 " Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing. "
37 " I wish I didn’t have a heart that God wrote Sad on. "
38 " 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. "
39 " 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. "
40 " 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 "