A biography for Benjamin Alire Sáenzhasn’t been written yet.
“You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.”
“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.”
“I guess I didn't have it so bad.Maybe everybody didn't love me,but i wasn't one of those kids that everyone hated,either.I was good in a fight.So people left me alone.i was almost invisible.i think i liked it that way.And then Dante came along.”
“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.”
“How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?”
“I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.”
“I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So 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.”
“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.”
“Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.""I know," she said. "Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.”
“I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.”
“We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.”
“Some boys... Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.”
“Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.”
“Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.”
“I wish I didn’t have a heart that God wrote Sad on.”
“I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.”
“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.”
“I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.”
“I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.”
“The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.”