Junot Díaz Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

Junot Díaz
When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

Junot Díaz
That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

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

Junot Díaz
It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

Junot Díaz
Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won't work.

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

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

Junot Díaz
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
Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

Junot Díaz
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
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
You know how it is when you get back with somebody you've loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again

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

Junot Díaz
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
Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

Junot Díaz
In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

Junot Díaz
But back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

Junot Díaz
What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

Junot Díaz
Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.

Junot Díaz
A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.

Junot Díaz