Quotes from Junot Diaz

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

It was hard at first. Once you've been fuera, Santo Domingo is the smallest place in the world. But if I've learned anything in my travels it's that a person can get used to anything. Even Santo Domingo.

Ana Iris m-a întrebat odat? dac?-l iubesc, iar eu i-am vorbit despre luminile din vechea mea cas? din capital?, despre cum pâlpâiau È™i nu È™tiai niciodat? dac? urmau s? se sting? sau nu. ÎÈ›i laÈ™i treaba deoparte È™i aÈ™tepÈ›i È™i nu poÈ›i face cu adev?rat nimic pân? nu se hot?r?sc. Asta, i-am spus, este ceea ce simt.

We're committed to the idea that a book has to live in the present . . . but the reality, that's hard for us to recognise, is that a book has to live in the future.

nunca se puede escapar. Jamás. La única salida está por dentro.

For the first time I actually feel like I owned my skin, like it was me and I was it.

We didn't know it was the last days but we should have.

folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.

You had an elaborate system that you thought would keep us out of bed: you sat on the other side of the room, you didn't let me crack your knuckles, you never stayed more than fifteen minutes. It never really worked, did it?

Hail, Dog of God, was how he welcomed me my first day in Demarest. Took a week before I figured out what the hell he meant. God. Domini. Dog. Canis. Hail, Dominicanis.

elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and

Nunca son los cambios que queremos los que cambian todo.

blur trying to shy away from the camera. I listen to her advice and on my way to and from work I concentrate on the other

A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition that something in your life is about to change...

Tarde venientibus ossa.)

On one DR trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked.

So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!

where you'd parked your Civic.

Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother's lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what's wrong with women.

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.

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about—he wasn't no home-runner hitter or fly bachetero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution, but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air. The generation reaching consciousness in a society that lacked any. The generation that despite the consensus that declared change impossible hankered for change all the same.

Porfirio Rubirosa.

I seem to be allergic to diligence