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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

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  I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.

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

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  It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can’t talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?

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  If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

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

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  You are thirst and thirst is all I know

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  It’s a complex thing when you’re writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious.

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  Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

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• 

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

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  I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

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

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  The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.

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  I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.

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• 

  Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

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  We have this huge discourse on family in this country, but no one deconstructs it the same way. People talk about “the American family.” The right wing has this thing – Focus on the Family. What the hell is that?

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  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.

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