Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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