Quotes from Junot Diaz

because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

the squares on your abdomen have been reabsorbed, like tiny islands in a rising sea of lard.

Decent people live around here and that's how we're going to live. You're Americans now. He had his Chivas Regal bottle on his knee.

I doubt that I can speak for all Dominican men but I doubt they can either.

From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis...

Dale un galletazo

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. That last year she was especially Ave Maria. Had her prayer group over to our apartment two, three times a day. The Four Horsefaces of the Apocalypse, I called them.

Mami said nothing for a while, and then she went into her bedroom. I figured she was going to emerge with my father's Saturday-night special, the one thing of his that she'd kept when he left. To protect us, she claimed, but more likely to shoot my father dead if she ever saw him again.

A woman warmer than the air around her

And if I could have I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face

You didn't know we were occupyed twice in the 20th century? Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know that the US occupied Irak either.

My brother had never been the most rational of agents, but this one was the ill zinger.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture.

Sometimes you can be good at something that you still find really hard. Sometimes, to be good at something, you just need to keep showing the fuck up.

Se suponía que al crecer uno perdiera la capacidad de dormir con facilidad en lugares nuevos, pero yo nunca la tuve como para perderla.

After a spate of parties that led to nothing but being threatened by some drunk white boys, and dozens of classes where not a single girl looked at him, he felt the optimism wane, and before he even realised what had happened he had buried himself in what amounted to the college version of what he'd majored in all throughout high school: getting no ass. His happiest moments were genre moments, like when Akira was released (1988).

Don't bring up the Beyonder any more than necessary.

Knocked the architecture right out of his legs.

He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.

You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope.

She didn't seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at eleven at night, just to see what she was "up to." As much relationship as she could handle.

neatly at its foot, a gauze. I hear her gargling in the bathroom. My hands and feet are blue from the cold and I cannot see through the window for the frost and icicles. When Ana Iris starts

He said hi to her almost every day, all upbeat and faux-happy, and she said hi back, indifferently, but that was it. He didn't imagine that she remembered their kissing—but of course he could not forget.

They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what fuego means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself. Oscar--