Quotes from Junot Diaz

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.

He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn't have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming.

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you're allergic to is trying.

Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.

In your heart you thought she would hate you—that they would all hate you. I don't hate you. Tú eres mi hombre, she says proudly.

and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name

You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either.

They could have moderated things a little, don't you think, but they were, like, Fuck that, what are friendships for if not for instigating?

Then we fucked so that we could pretend that nothing hurtful had just happened.

To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve--

I know what it means to be moved by a book in my body so much that I go looking for its analog in the real world. [From an interview with Complex magazine, 12/2012]

The world, you tell yourself, will never end.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don't find every day.

The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.

It's perfectly fine if you don't believe in these "superstitions." In fact, it's better than fine—it's perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. . . . .Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. 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.

And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey, puto, turn that shit off.

Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are.

The capitan...one of those tall, arrogant, acerbically handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. Also one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was one of those moments that would always be Rutgers for me.

You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.

Al fin y al cabo, al éxito le encanta tener testigos, pero el fracaso no puede existir sin ellos

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.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú Americanus, or more colloquially, fukú-generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World.