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

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

Benjamin Alire Saenz

Related Topics

BoysRainSummer

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More Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes

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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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• 

  Words were different when they lived inside of you.

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

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  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.

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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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• 

  I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  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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• 

  I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

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• 

  I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

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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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• 

  Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

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• 

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

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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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• 

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

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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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  You are thirst and thirst is all I know

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

  BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ
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