Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante, #2)

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Love took you out of exile and carried you to a country called Belonging.

You’re the rain and you’re the desert and you’re the eraser that’s making the word “loneliness” disappear.

My love for him is silent. There are a thousand things living in that silence.”

Sometimes I had beautiful words living inside of me and I just couldn’t push those words out so that other people could see they were there.

Let yourself be loved. For all you know, there’s a long line of people wanting you to let them in.”

“You get used to not talking. You get used to the silence. It’s hard, you know, to break a silence that becomes a part of how you see yourself. Silence becomes a way of living.

“There’s no such thing as thinking too much. The world would be a better place if everyone did more thinking and less talking. There might be a lot less hatred.”

It’s funny, I didn’t ever pay much attention to adults because, well, because I just didn’t think about them and the fact that they had lives like I had a life. I guess I just thought they were in charge and they liked to tell you what to do. I hadn’t really thought about anything except what I felt. Damn, I’d lived in a pretty small fucking world. And this world I was living in now, it was complicated and confusing—and it sort of hurt to know that other people hurt. Adults. They hurt. And it was a good thing to know that. It was a better world that I was living in now. It was better. And I was better now. It was like I’d been ill. And I was recovering from an illness. But maybe that wasn’t true. I’d just been a stupid kid. And selfish. Maybe this is what being a man was. Okay, so maybe I wasn’t a man just yet. But maybe I was getting closer. I wasn’t a boy anymore, that was for sure.

That’s the thing about friends. Each one of them is different. And each friend knows something about you that your other friends don’t know. I guess a part of being friends is that you share a secret with each one of them. The secret doesn’t have to be a big secret. It could just be a little one. But sharing that secret is one of things that makes you friends. I thought that was pretty amazing.

“Sometimes telling someone you like them is a helluva lot better than telling someone you love them.”

“Don’t ever let anybody tell you that war is something beautiful or heroic. When people say war is hell, war is hell. Cowards start wars, and the brave fight them.”

‘There are no reasons to hate other people—especially other kinds of people. We make up reasons why other people are less human than we are. We make up reasons and then we believe those reasons and then those reasons become true and they are true because now we believe they are facts and we even forget where it all started—with a reason we made up.’

‘I have refrained from embracing for too long—now it is time for me to embrace. My time for silence has passed—now it is my time to speak. I have had my time to weep—now it is my time to laugh. My time to hate has passed. And now it is my time to love.

Love at any age is rare. It doesn’t get any easier when you’re older. No one knows what they’re doing when it comes to love.”

Try to hang on to that innocence for as long as you can. As we age, we get cynical. The world wears us down. We stop fighting.”