Quotes from Junot Diaz

We're all under the streetlamps, everyone's the color of day-old piss. When I'm fifty, this is how I'll remember my friends: tired and yellow and drunk.

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. ...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.

If you ask me I don't think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That's enough.

A father is a hard thing to compass.

Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.

You can't find intimacy—you can't find home—when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

I came to New York because I was fleeing from the double-wide baby stroller, from the culture of respectability of the bourgeois suburban middle class. And my dream is that the elements of New York that are vital—the elements that are artistic, that are alternative, that resist capital, that are humane—not only endure but thrive, and maybe they do some sort of aikido reversal. They take [diversity-killing trends] and fucking slam them on their heads.

It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?

Maybe we were together some other time. I can't think when, I said. You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago. People weren't even people back then.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I'm from the Dominican Republic. They're the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.

But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

And all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.

No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number...

if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.

It would have broken my heart if it hadn't been so damn familiar. I guess I'd gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.

A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli's first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.