Quotes from Junot Diaz

I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit. —It's ours too, he said.

One day while watching his mother tear sheets off the beds it dawned on him that the family curse he'd heard about his whole life might actually be true. Fukú. He rolled the word experimentally in his mouth. Fuck you.

It was like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless.

Waited for my brother and didn't talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she'd always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn't talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories.

Saw for a brief instant La Inca praying in her room - the silence that lay between them now, stronger than love - and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she'd not even had her own name.

Oscar's moms had bought their house with double shifts at her two jobs. Ybón bought hers with double shifts too, but in a window in Amsterdam.)

I must have the footprint of fresh disaster on my face. They listen to my troubles like they're a couple of capos and I'm talking murder.

I grew up in a post-dictatorship dictatorship society. The axis of likability is how dictatorships survive. Becoming popular is part of what dictatorships hijack to remain in power. For me to write things from the same toxic axis that made stronger the dictatorship that completely disfigured my family and my society, it just wasn't going to happen.

dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don't take after me. Dominican

Que hombre.)

En el Caribe cuando alguien habla bien tiene el respeto de la gente y de pequeño yo veía eso y me encantaba. Supongo que como a nosotros nos impusieron ese idioma colonial [el español] la resistencia consistió en eso: "Ok, tengo que aprenderlo, pero lo voy a convertir en oportunidad".

You know, she said finally, we colored folks talk plenty of shit about loving our children but we really don't. She exhaled. We don't, we don't, we don't.

People like her got addictive personalities. You don't want to be catching that.

She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.

In December we move into the house. It's a half-ruin and only two rooms are habitable. It resembles the first place I lived when I arrived in this country. We don't have heat for the entire winter, and for a month we have to bathe from a bucket. Casa de Campo, I call the place in jest, but he doesn't take kindly to any criticism of his "niño." Not everyone can own a home, he reminds me. I saved eight years for this.

In August Rafa quit his job at the carpet factory—I'm too fucking tired, he complained, and some mornings his leg bones hurt so much he couldn't get out of bed right away. The Romans used to shatter these with iron clubs, I told him while I massaged his shins. The pain would kill you instantly. Great, he said. Cheer me up some more, you fucking bastard.

He read The Lord of the Rings for what I'm estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and greatest comforts since he'd first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favorite librarian had said, Here, try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line "and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls" and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much.

El mundo tiene suficientes tragedias como para que no sea necesario recurrir a las maldiciones en busca de explicación.

Nuestro héroe no era uno de esos dominicanos de quienes todo el mundo anda hablando, no era ningún jonronero ni fly bachatero, ni un playboy con un millón de conquistas.

Así son los blancos. Pierden un gato y hacen sonar la alarma y hay titulares en primera plana, pero nosotros, los dominicanos, perdemos una hija y puede que ni cancelemos la cita en la peluquería.

half the buildings still needed their wiring and in the evening light these structures sprawled about like ships of brick that had run aground.

mariconcito

Parece que soy alérgico a la actividad. Y Lola dijo: Ja, me parece más bien que eres alérgico a todo tipo de esfuerzo.