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Junot Díaz Quotes

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience. He received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Díaz immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was six years old. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and shortly after graduating created the character "Yunior", who served as narrator of several of his later books. After obtaining his MFA from Cornell University, Díaz published his first book, the 1995 short story collection Drown. In 2007, he published his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, followed in 2012 by a second short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. Since 2007, Diaz was reported to be working on another novel, entitled Monstro; however, in June 2015 Diaz stated that he had effectively abandoned that novel.

✵ 31. December 1968  •  Other names جونو دیاز
Junot Díaz photo

Works

This Is How You Lose Her
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Drown
Drown
Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz: 75 quotes0 likes

Famous Junot Díaz Quotes

“You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The beauty! The beauty!”

Junot Díaz

Source: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao

Junot Díaz Quotes about love

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz

“The half life of love is forever.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Variant: The half-life of love is forever.
Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz Quotes about life

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz

Profile in Playboy magazine (August 2013) http://www.playboy.com/articles/junot-diaz-brief-history

Junot Díaz: Trending quotes

“And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz Quotes

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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?”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“A person doesn't mourn forever.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book Drown

Source: Drown

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz

“… 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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book Drown

Source: Drown

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book Drown

Source: Drown

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“The only way out is in.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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

Junot Díaz book Drown

Source: Drown

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

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

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

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

“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.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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