Junot Diaz Quotes

Deep down, where my boys don't know me, I'm an optimist.

People like her got addictive personalities. You don't want to be catching that.

...sometimes a start is all we ever get.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

She picks off my glasses and kisses the parts of my face that almost never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame

I act most like myself ... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

They could have moderated things a little, don't you think, but they were, like, Fuck that, what are friendships for if not for instigating?

Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with it.

I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

It's like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it's biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose. That

Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.

My brother had never been the most rational of agents, but this one was the ill zinger.

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number ...

She wanted to talk about unimportant matters, to speak to someone who wasn't her child or her spouse.

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

I look most like myself ... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
- But your yourself sucks!
- It is, lamentably, all I have.

Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

It was the curse that made me do it, you know. I don't believe in that sh*t, Oscar. That's our parents' sh*t. It's ours, too, he said.

He doesn't speak for a moment, as if the silence is the elastic that will bring his next words forward.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.

We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.

Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

I felt like summer had taken me over.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.

The truth is there ain't no relationship in the world that doesn't hit turbulence.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.

I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

The world, you tell yourself, will never end.

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.

They only hit he you, he says, when they care.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

I was seventeen and a half, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot.

She is an exceptionally beautiful girl. You think of that old saying Show me a beautiful girl and I'll show you someone who is tired of fucking her.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

I always thought of myself as the Kaneda of our dyad, but here I was playing Tetsuo.

I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.

Besides it only happens when you're not looking for it.
That's what everybody claims. Easier to say that than This shit sucks.

And when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

Knocked the architecture right out of his legs.

Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?

Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.

You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.

She seemed tired and watched the world outside like maybe she was expecting it to speak to her.

Elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and

When you're sixteen a body like this is free; when you're forty it's a full-time occupation.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.

Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

Some of our hearts are more Gothic and take to haunting.

A father is a hard thing to compass.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

If this is the United States, mail me home.

Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.

One Ring. Like stumbling into

Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.

The world was ice and the ice burned with sunlight.

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to.

One of the ex-sucias publishes a poem about you online. It's called El Puto

We're clocks, Abelard. Nothing more.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should've arrested him for it.

I feel most like myself ... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.

She has the scared, hunted look of the unlucky.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

Every time someone gives you a formula for what you should be and what you should do, you should know they're giving you a pair of handcuffs.

If this was another kind of story, I'd tell you about the sea

I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

I dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex ...

Sometimes you can be good at something that you still find really hard. Sometimes, to be good at something, you just need to keep showing the fuck up.

And all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.

It's one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

There's nothing permanent in the world,

I am a hard man to replace.

Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you're allergic to is trying.

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.