Quotes from Junot Diaz

Okay, we didn´t work, and all memories to tell you the truth aren't good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours.

Sure, I liked girls but I was always too terrified to speak to them unless we were arguing or I was calling them stupidos, which was one of my favorite words that year.

I already told you it's over, he snaps. What else do you want? A maldito corpse? You women never know how to leave things alone. You never know how to let go.

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, behind 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.

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. And that's what I guess these stories are all about. Yes, no doubt about it: I would have run. La Inca or not, I would have run.

Depois olhas para ela e sorris um sorriso que o teu rosto hipócrita irá recordar até ao fim dos teus dias. Querida, dizes, isto é apenas um capítulo do meu romance. É assim que a perdes.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else Gustavo Pérez Firmat

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. And that's what I guess these stories are all about.

Stared at the toothpick-thin blackgirl who worked at the Friendly's, whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak.

Their flashlight newly activated, they walked him into the cane--never had he heard anything so loud and alien, the susurration, the crackling, the flashes of motion underfoot (snake? mongoose?), overhead even the stars, all of them gathered in vainglorious congress.

The guards then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that Abelard was a homosexual and a Communist — That is untrue! Abelard protested — but who is going to listen to a gay comunista?

She's dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass—when you least expect it she cuts you.

This is how you treat your mother?" she cried. And if I could of I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face, but instead I screamed back, "And this is how you treat your daughter?

She saw our young minds as bright, spiky sunflowers in need of light, and arranged us as close to the TV as possible to maximize our exposure.

I would have waited until we got back to the States, waited like paja de arroz, burning slow, slow, until they dropped their guard and then one morning I would have disappeared. Like my father disappeared on my mother and was never seen again. Disappear like everything disappears.

Every time someone gives you a formula for what you should be and what you should do, you should know they're giving you a pair of handcuffs.

In fact, I believe that, barring a couple of key moments, Beli never thought about that life again. Embraced the amnesia that was so common throughout the Islands, five parts denial, five parts negative hallucination. Embraced the power of the Untilles. And from it forged herself anew.

We're clocks, Abelard. Nothing more.

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

He's the sort of man who'll go to the airport but won't be able to get on board, she says

with the sun sliding out of the sky like spit off a wall . . .

No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated.

Some of our hearts are more Gothic and take to haunting.

I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it's too fucking late but the boys weren't into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.