Quotes from Junot Diaz

Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

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.

There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children. Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

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

what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

A romantic she was, but not a pendeja.

His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of a chance he had for young love. Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, beind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. 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 felt like summer had taken me over.

Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn't give up the ass for any reason. I can't, she said. I can't make any mistakes. ...Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don't get in anywhere, she said. You'd still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable.

That night you lay in bed, awake, and listened to the ambulances tear down our street. The heat of your face could have kept my room warm for days. I didn't know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face. I almost couldn't touch you. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.

Deep down, where my boys don't know me, I'm an optimist.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, and the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.

One of the ex-sucias publishes a poem about you online. It's called "El Puto

Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.

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

Anger has a way of returning.

I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out —a place we down cats weren't supposed to go. But love teaches you. Clears your head of any rules.

They are walking hand in hand and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her.

Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother's daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love.

They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven.

That's about it. 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 should say something but I don't know where a person can start.

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. You don't know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around.