Junot Díaz Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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
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
Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.

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

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

Junot Díaz
I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.

Junot Díaz
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
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.

Junot Díaz
Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.

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

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

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

Junot Díaz
You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

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

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

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

Junot Díaz
You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who's trying to get thin.

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

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

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

Junot Díaz
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
You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.

Junot Díaz
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
We live in a patriarchal imaginary where men cannot conceptualise women as fully human. What's really important is how this shit resides in us, how this just lives in us, man, even if we're the good guy – it should give a motherfucker pause.

Junot Díaz
If you think learning salsa is your future, you're going to be pretty insufferable in salsa classes.

Junot Díaz
Our visions of an immigrant community and an immigrant experience are highly moralistic. I feel like our reality is William Gibson meets Toni Morrison, yet the way we're interpreting the morality of immigrants is Chaucer.

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

Junot Díaz