Quotes from Junot Diaz

She, of course, told me this shit, because she couldn't stop herself from telling me everything she's thinking.

Papi was a voracious reader, couldn't even go cheating without a paperback in his pocket.

Besides it only happens when you're not looking for it. That's what everybody claims. Easier to say that than This shit sucks.

I was seventeen and a half, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot.

This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better.

Ella nunca hablaba de lo que eran; sólo decía, ¡Man, me alegro tanto de haberte conocido! Y él contestaba, Y yo de ser quien soy conociéndote.

She was my Old World Dominican mother and I was her only daughter

Ese muchacho está bueno!

There's nothing permanent in the world

That's the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child's black complexion as an ill omen.

I had expected a different father, one about seven feet tall with enough money to buy our entire barrio, but this one was average height, with an average face.

She wanted to talk about unimportant matters, to speak to someone who wasn't her child or her spouse.

Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men.

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

The best ones not only hold their own when faced with the noise of the world, they silence it.

Okay, we didn't work, and all the memories to tell you the truth aren't good. But sometimes there were good times.

eres guapa!

You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

One Ring. Like stumbling into

Muchacho del diablo!

That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not even cancel our appointment at the salon.

He wrote that he couldn't believe he'd had to wait for this so goddamn long. (Ybón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.)

That night Ana Iris and I go to a movie. We cannot understand the English but we both like the new theater's clean rugs.

Student today don't mean na', but in a Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the Fall of Arbenz, by the Stoning of Nixon, by the Guerrillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs—in a Latin America already a year and half into the Decade of the Guerrilla—a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a vibrating quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe.