Top 100 Junot Diaz Quotes
#1. Visitation Street is urban opera writ large. Gritty and magical, filled with mystery, poetry and pain, Ivy Pochoda's voice recalls Richard Price, Junot Diaz, and even Alice Sebold, yet it's indelibly her own.
Dennis Lehane
#2. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz)
Carolina De Robertis
#3. The half life of love is forever."
- Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her
Robyn Collins
#4. 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.
Junot Diaz
#5. Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.
Junot Diaz
#6. 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
#7. Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
Junot Diaz
#8. They would be able to tell. Even the most bruto would see the death in your eyes.
Junot Diaz
#9. I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.
Junot Diaz
#10. You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
Junot Diaz
#11. 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
#12. 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.
Junot Diaz
#13. the squares on your abdomen have been reabsorbed, like tiny islands in a rising sea of lard.
Junot Diaz
#14. You can't be a human without seeing.
Junot Diaz
#15. God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
Junot Diaz
#16. Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz
#17. 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
#18. I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.
Junot Diaz
#19. To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve
Junot Diaz
#20. We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.
Junot Diaz
#21. The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It is probably her son she misses, or the father. Or our whole country, which you never think of until it's gone, which you never love until you're no longer there.
Junot Diaz
#25. Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.
Junot Diaz
#26. I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
Junot Diaz
#27. 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
#28. To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.
Junot Diaz
#29. The world was ice and the ice burned with sunlight.
Junot Diaz
#30. But hey, it's only a story, with no solid evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love.
Junot Diaz
#31. 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
#32. Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.
Junot Diaz
#33. Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.
Junot Diaz
#34. My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor.
Junot Diaz
#35. I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.
Junot Diaz
#36. People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.
Junot Diaz
#37. 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
#38. Writing checks with his mouth that his ass could never hope to cover.
Junot Diaz
#39. I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic.
Junot Diaz
#40. The world, you tell yourself, will never end.
Junot Diaz
#42. This is how you treat your mother?" she cried. And if I could of I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face, but instead I screamed back, "And this is how you treat your daughter?
Junot Diaz
#43. 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
#44. This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better.
Junot Diaz
#45. When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.
Junot Diaz
#47. 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
#48. As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.
Junot Diaz
#49. 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
#50. Waited for my brother and didn't talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she'd always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn't talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories.
Junot Diaz
#51. It's like Abuela says: Every snake always thinks it's biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose. That
Junot Diaz
#52. We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves.
Junot Diaz
#53. 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
#54. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
Junot Diaz
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. the only time she looked straight at anything was when she looked out a window.
Junot Diaz
#58. I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading ... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
Junot Diaz
#59. You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.
Junot Diaz
#60. 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
#61. These were the early Clinton years but the economy was still sucking an eighties cock ...
Junot Diaz
#62. I seem to be allergic to diligence
Junot Diaz
#63. 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
#64. Freezing out," she said. She had her gloves in one hand like a crumpled bouquet.
Junot Diaz
#65. 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.
Junot Diaz
#66. He doesn't speak for a moment, as if the silence is the elastic that will bring his next words forward.
Junot Diaz
#67. 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
#68. These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?
Junot Diaz
#69. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up.
Junot Diaz
#70. You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.
Junot Diaz
#71. Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
Junot Diaz
#72. We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.
Junot Diaz
#73. I was really drawn to thinking about the women in my life. Thinking about my mother, who's a very powerful force on me. And I have these two very strong sisters who took up a lot of imaginary space in my life.
Junot Diaz
#74. I always thought of myself as the Kaneda of our dyad, but here I was playing Tetsuo.
Junot Diaz
#75. Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
Junot Diaz
#76. Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.
Junot Diaz
#77. 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.
Junot Diaz
#78. I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
Junot Diaz
#79. How much English do you know? None, Papi said after a moment. Eulalio shook his head. Papi met Eulalio last and liked him least.
Junot Diaz
#80. I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety.
Junot Diaz
#81. Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.
Junot Diaz
#82. She picks off my glasses and kisses the parts of my face that almost never get touched, the skin under the glass and frame
Junot Diaz
#83. I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.
Junot Diaz
#84. I think what happened to me was that I was always being taught to look, but one day I started to see. And it was because a lot of women in my life were refusing just to be looked at, to be this passive figure.
Junot Diaz
#85. Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.'
Junot Diaz
#86. Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
#87. On one DR trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked.
Junot Diaz
#88. One of the ex-sucias publishes a poem about you online. It's called El Puto
Junot Diaz
#89. 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
#90. This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Junot Diaz
#91. Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable.
Junot Diaz
#92. A father is a hard thing to compass.
Junot Diaz
#93. I already told you it's over, he snaps. What else do you want? A maldito corpse? You women never know how to leave things alone. You never know how to let go.
Junot Diaz
#94. Their flashlight newly activated, they walked him into the cane
never had he heard anything so loud and alien, the susurration, the crackling, the flashes of motion underfoot (snake? mongoose?), overhead even the stars, all of them gathered in vainglorious congress.
Junot Diaz
#95. Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are.
Junot Diaz
#96. Sometimes you can be good at something that you still find really hard. Sometimes, to be good at something, you just need to keep showing the fuck up.
Junot Diaz
#97. To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.
Junot Diaz
#98. I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit.
Junot Diaz
#99. 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
#100. People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
Junot Diaz
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