Junot Díaz Quotes

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven - where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with - he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

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.

Nuestra relación no era el sol, la luna y las estrellas pero tampoco era una mierda.

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.

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

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

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

Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother's lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what's wrong with women.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

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