Junot Díaz citations

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”