Junot Díaz citations

Page 2

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”