Quotes from Junot Diaz

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

A person doesn't mourn forever.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won't work.

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.

and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn't call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i'll want to see you every day. At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I'm with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

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

Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should've arrested him for it.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.