Quotes from Junot Diaz

things. For a day he will smell of my job, but I know that bread is stronger than blood. I have not stopped watching

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.

130Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to.

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.

It was the curse that made me do it, you know. I don't believe in that sh*t, Oscar. That's our parents' sh*t. It's ours, too, he said.

you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock...

She has the scared, hunted look of the unlucky.

How much English do you know? None, Papi said after a moment. Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and liked him least.

If this is the United States, mail me home.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

The skies will be magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, That's nice, right?

I dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex...

These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?

With the Gangster our girl finally got her chance. Who is surprised that in the final four months of her relationship with him there would be such an outpouring of affect? As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

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.

He cried often for his love of some girl or another. Cried in the bathroom, where nobody could hear him.

We hurt each other too well to let it drop

She picks off my glasses and kisses the parts of my face that almost never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame

He used to sleep with my hair over his face. He used to say it made him feel safe.

What Hatüey said on the pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I'd rather go to Hell.)

What can you do? Tomás said. Life smacks everybody around.

Beli thought about it a moment. Thought about La Inca waiting for her at home. Thought about the heartbreak that was beginning to fade in her. Yes. I want to go. There it was, the decision that changed everything. Or as she broke it down to Lola in her last days. All I wanted was to dance. What I got instead was "esto", she said, opening her arms to encompass the hospital, her children, her cancer, America.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die.