Quotes from Junot Diaz

You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.

When your mother had confronted your brother about Mrs. del Orbe he didn't deny it. What do you want, Ma? Se metío por mis ojos. Por mis ojos my ass, she had said. Tú te metiste por su culo. That's true, your brother admitted cheerily. Y por su boca. And then your mother puched him, helpless with shame and fury, which only made him laugh.

I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.

When your mother had confronted your brother about Mrs. del Orbe he didn't deny it. What do you want, Ma? Se metío por mis ojos. Por mis ojos my ass, she had said. Tú te metiste por su culo. That's true, your brother admitted cheerily. Y por su boca. And then your mother punched him, helpless with shame and fury, which only made him laugh.

Right before I headed out, he said: It was the curse that made me do it, you know. I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit. It's ours too, he said.

They only hit you when they care.

I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

It was in that hour of tribulation, however, that a hand reached out for her and she remembered who she was.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes.

She was the kind of girlfriend that god gives you young, so that you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Later when he thought about it he realized that these very cousins could have gotten him laid if only he'd bothered to hang out with them. But you can't regret the life you didn't lead.)

Hers was the generation that would launch the Revolution, but which for the moment was turning blue for want of air.

They reached the Elizabeth exit, which is what New Jersey is really known for, industrial wastes on both sides of the turn-pike. He had started holding his breath against those horrible fumes when Ana let loose

It's one of those easy stories because in essence it explains it all.

Freezing out," she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare dog that was cracked open in the Antilles.

Was I really reading my roommate's journal behind his back? Of course I was.

desapariciones. La dejaban en mala posición ante La Inca y los vecinos, que siempre le preguntaban

Nelson Pardo who was so stupid, he thought the moon was a stain that God had forgotten to clean

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

Let's just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.