Junot Díaz Quotes

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

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.

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 whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

...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.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

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

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.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

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.

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

He's really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.

Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men.

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.

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.

Deep down, where my boys don't know me, I'm an optimist.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don't find every day.

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

Sure, I liked girls but I was always too terrified to speak to them unless we were arguing or I was calling them stupidos, which was one of my favorite words that year.

But beautiful girl above all beautiful girls, ' he wrote back, 'This is my home.

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

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

Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.