01c. 1954 ADWords could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
03c. 1954 ADSee, 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1954 ADI 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.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
05c. 1954 ADI wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
07c. 1954 ADDo 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.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
08c. 1954 ADI 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.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
09c. 1954 ADThe problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
13c. 1954 ADHe 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.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
14c. 1954 ADBut 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 Sáenz / quote ↗
15c. 1954 ADI 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 worseBenjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
16c. 1954 ADI don't know what the exact shape of my life will take--and what the days to come will bring--except i know that i am happy and my heart is still. I know that I have fallen in love with the word surrender and know that I can no longer live in disappointmentBenjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
17c. 1954 ADSo 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 didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
18c. 1954 ADAll I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
19c. 1954 ADI decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
20c. 1954 ADDad? 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.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
21c. 1954 ADI’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 Sáenz / quote ↗
22c. 1954 ADI 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 Sáenz / quote ↗
24c. 1954 ADWhat 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. It's just simple logic.Benjamin Alire Sáenz / quote ↗
