Benjamin Alire Saenz

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

“But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”

“But I had learned to hide what I felt. No, that's not true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt.”

“Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.”

“Everyone was always becoming someone else.”

“Typically, I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything.”

“Smiles are like that. They come and go.”

“. . . Alive is a place. Alive is the new word for home.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 you're not making someone bleed.”

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

“The problem with parents is that they're adults.”

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”

“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.”

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

“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”

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

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”

“Maybe tears were something you caught. Like the flu.”

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

“I do not know what it means to be okay. I have never known and maybe I will never know. Okay is just a word I use so I won't have to talk about what's inside. Okay is a word that means I am going to keep my secrets.”

“This is my theory: the people who shouldn't hate themselves, do hate themselves. And the people who should hate themselves, don't hate themselves. The world is all backwards. See, this is one of the many reasons why God and I are not good friends.”

“It felt like there was a whole world living inside her. I didn't know anything about that world.”

“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.”

“Dogs don't censor themselves. Maybe animals were smarter than people. The dog was so happy. My mom and dad too. It felt good to know that they loved the dog, that they let themselves do that. And somehow it seemed that the dog helped us be a better family.”

“You should just sit them down and make them tell you. Make them be adults.""You can't make anyone be an adult. Especially an adult.”

“It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else.”

“I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.”

“Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.”

“See, the thing about guys is that I didn't really care to be around them. I mean, guys really made me uncomfortable. I don't know why, not exactly. I just, I don't know, I just didn't belong. I think it embarrassed the hell out of me that I was a guy. And it really depressed me that there was the distinct possibility that I was going to grow up and be like one of those assholes.”

“Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?”

“I came to understand that my father was a careful man. To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”

“That was the day that my brother was in our house again. In a strange and inexplicable way, my brother had come home.”

“It was like she understood something about me that she'd never quite understood before. I always felt that when she looked at me, she was trying to find me, trying to find out who I was. But it seemed at that moment that she saw me, that she knew me. But that confused me.”

“I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.”

“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.”

“Gina and Susie were cool, though. No hint of the beer they said they were going to score. They played good girls to my parents. Not that they weren't good girls. That's exactly what they were: good girls who wanted to pretend they were bad girls but who never would be bad girls because they were too decent.”

“For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.”

“Sometimes, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone.”

“I knew what he was saying, and I wished to God he was someone else, someone who didn't have to say things out loud.”

“Your smile is back.' That's what Dante said.'Smiles are like that. They come and go.”

“And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness.Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?”

“And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.”

“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.”

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”

“Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.”

“Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew up without television.”

“I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?”

“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.”