Junot Díaz Quotes

“Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.”

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

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

“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.”

“The beauty! The beauty!”

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

“Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.”

“The half life of love is forever.”

“Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.”

“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.”

“Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”

“That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.”

“You can't regret the life you didn't lead.”

“This life takes a lot more courage than I ever gave it credit for. When I was growing up around here I was always fantasizing heroic shit without realizing that what was shaping up was going to be the greatest heroic adventure of them all: trying to live and be a decent human being. That shit takes more courage than I ever had.”

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”

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

“You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.”

“If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.”

“Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.”

“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.”

“… sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

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

“You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?”

“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”

“but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”

“I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.”

“Nothing more exhilarating… than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”

“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.

This is how you lose her.”

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

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

“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.”

“It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.”

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U. S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

“You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.”

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

“Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa.
To the latecomers are left the bones.”

“You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.”

“A person doesn't mourn forever.”

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

“Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.”

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

“What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.”

“… 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.”

“You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i’ll want to see you every day.

At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.”

“Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.”

“Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.”

“I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.”

“Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.”

“Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.”

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

“The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.”

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture”

“She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.”

“In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

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

“Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”

“The only way out is in.”

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

“Clavo saca clavo.
Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.”

“She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.”

“Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, ourselves to look like elves?”

“Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your drowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.”

“I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.”

“I put my hand on her knee. I just wish you'd say you love me.”