Top 100 Junot Diaz Quotes
#1. 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.
Junot Diaz
#2. They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes.
Junot Diaz
#3. Never had the opportunity in her first lost childhood; and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth.
Junot Diaz
#4. You can't be a human without seeing.
Junot Diaz
#5. Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
#6. My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Junot Diaz
#7. I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.
Junot Diaz
#8. What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.
Junot Diaz
#9. She didn't seem to mind being the girl you called every couple of months at eleven at night, just to see what she was "up to." As much relationship as she could handle.
Junot Diaz
#10. But hey, it's only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.
Junot Diaz
#11. Motherfuckers will read a book that's one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we're taking over.
Junot Diaz
#12. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.
Junot Diaz
#13. Writing checks with his mouth that his ass could never hope to cover.
Junot Diaz
#14. I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing.
Junot Diaz
#15. This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better.
Junot Diaz
#16. 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.
Junot Diaz
#17. As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.
Junot Diaz
#18. 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.
Junot Diaz
#19. Neatly at its foot, a gauze. I hear her gargling in the bathroom. My hands and feet are blue from the cold and I cannot see through the window for the frost and icicles. When Ana Iris starts
Junot Diaz
#20. It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
Junot Diaz
#21. 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.
Junot Diaz
#22. 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.
Junot Diaz
#23. I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
Junot Diaz
#24. I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
Junot Diaz
#25. I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety.
Junot Diaz
#26. Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
Junot Diaz
#27. You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
Junot Diaz
#28. 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.
Junot Diaz
#29. Mami said nothing for a while, and then she went into her bedroom. I figured she was going to emerge with my father's Saturday-night special, the one thing of his that she'd kept when he left. To protect us, she claimed, but more likely to shoot my father dead if she ever saw him again.
Junot Diaz
#30. Don't tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the year the United States invaded your island.
Junot Diaz
#31. Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
Junot Diaz
#32. Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.
Junot Diaz
#33. 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.
Junot Diaz
#34. Elsewhere called the Strom Thurmond Maneuver.) Pujols of course blamed Beli for everything. Sat in the office of the rector and
Junot Diaz
#35. I think women have been cheating widely as much as men have.
Junot Diaz
#36. Heavier than bad luck and twice as ugly.
Junot Diaz
#37. He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn't have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming.
Junot Diaz
#38. We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
Junot Diaz
#39. She blew out of the Terrace sometime before Christmas to points unknown. The Gujarati guy told me when I ran into him at the Pathmark. He was still pissed because Pura had stiffed him almost two months' rent.
Last time I ever rent to one of you people.
Amen, I said.
Junot Diaz
#40. 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.
Junot Diaz
#41. My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
Junot Diaz
#42. We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We've got to deal with this reality. We've got to extend the franchise.
Junot Diaz
#43. As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.
Junot Diaz
#44. I always hated obvious dreams like that. I still do.
Junot Diaz
#45. I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
Junot Diaz
#46. There's nothing permanent in the world,
Junot Diaz
#47. Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd be it. But instead I happen to be, in the tree of life of writers, down at the bottom, with the hematodes.
Junot Diaz
#48. She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
Junot Diaz
#49. I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Junot Diaz
#50. She saw our young minds as bright, spiky sunflowers in need of light, and arranged us as close to the TV as possible to maximize our exposure.
Junot Diaz
#51. But back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Diaz
#52. Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.
Junot Diaz
#53. Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.
Junot Diaz
#54. There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.
Junot Diaz
#55. We were on our way to the colmado for an errand.
Junot Diaz
#56. I act most like myself ... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
Junot Diaz
#57. Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
Junot Diaz
#58. Deep down, where my boys don't know me, I'm an optimist.
Junot Diaz
#59. Everyone warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat
Junot Diaz
#60. I was staring at you and you were staring at me and right then it was sort of like love, wasn't it?
Junot Diaz
#61. And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey, puto, turn that shit off.
Junot Diaz
#62. The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.
Junot Diaz
#63. Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
Junot Diaz
#64. I dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex ...
Junot Diaz
#65. Every time you think about the ex, every time the loneliness rears up in you like a seething, burning continent, you tie on your shoes and hit the paths and that helps; it really does.
Junot Diaz
#66. We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.
Junot Diaz
#67. I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.
Junot Diaz
#68. You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope.
Junot Diaz
#69. ...sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Junot Diaz
#70. I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.
Junot Diaz
#71. I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.
Junot Diaz
#72. I know what it means to be moved by a book in my body so much that I go looking for its analog in the real world.
[From an interview with Complex magazine, 12/2012]
Junot Diaz
#73. Maybe we met out here and fell in love over bad barbecue.
Junot Diaz
#74. With the sun sliding out of the sky like spit off a wall ...
Junot Diaz
#75. Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.
Junot Diaz
#76. 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.
Junot Diaz
#77. Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Junot Diaz
#78. You breathe nonstop, like a marathon runner, but it doesn't help.
Junot Diaz
#79. Some of our hearts are more Gothic and take to haunting.
Junot Diaz
#80. I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
Junot Diaz
#81. 'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.
Junot Diaz
#82. I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
Junot Diaz
#83. In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.
Junot Diaz
#84. 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.
Junot Diaz
#85. As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.
Junot Diaz
#86. My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.
Junot Diaz
#87. I really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven't been written yet. Certainly haven't been published yet.
Junot Diaz
#88. Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
Junot Diaz
#89. I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
Junot Diaz
#90. Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
Junot Diaz
#91. I felt like summer had taken me over.
Junot Diaz
#92. Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
Junot Diaz
#93. If this is the United States, mail me home.
Junot Diaz
#94. My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.
Junot Diaz
#95. No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.
Junot Diaz
#96. 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
Junot Diaz
#97. 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.
Junot Diaz
#98. If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
Junot Diaz
#100. My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
Junot Diaz
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