Quotes from Junot Diaz

In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles. But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth. I just nodded my head, said, See you around, Lola, and drove home.

Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn't have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic.

a particularly Jersey malaise--the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

My heart is beating like it's lonely, like there's nothing else inside of me.

Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

The only way out is in.

Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is going insane, and I had to bolt upstairs and put him in a headlock.

She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.

I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn't it?

You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced - like totally utterly convinced - that the world was going to blow itself to pieces.

Crying all the time had made her more beautiful. Grief will do that sometimes. Not for me. Loretta had left months ago and I still looked like hell.

Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your drowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.

You know how it is when you get back with somebody you've loved. It felt better than it ever was, better than it ever could be again

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?

Do you remember? When the fights seemed to go on and on, and always ended with us in bed, tearing at each other like maybe that could change everything. In a couple of months you'd be seeing somebody else and I would too; she was no darker than you but she washed her panties in the shower and had hair like a sea of little punos and the first time you saw us, you turned around and boarded a bus I knew you didn't have to take. When my girl said, Who was that? I said, Just some girl.

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.

Entonces cállate la fucking boca.

I put my hand on her knee. I just wish you'd say you love me.

Revenge is living well, without you.