quotes by Junot Díaz

"Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"It's never the changes we want that change everything."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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."
— Junot Díaz

"But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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 tentacle growing out of your chest."
— Junot Díaz

"Junot Diaz said about writers: "What we 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.""
— Junot Díaz

"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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters."
— Junot Díaz

"Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
- But your yourself sucks!
- It is, lamentably, all I have."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"It's never the changes we want that change everything."
— Junot Díaz

"...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-..."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number..."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world"
— Junot Díaz

"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."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided, couldn't figure his way out of it.

Fukú."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"The only way out is in."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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.) "
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"It's never the changes we want that change everything."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?"
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked"
— Junot Díaz

"We were on our way to the colmado for an errand."
— Junot Díaz (Drown)

"...her other paramour was a student at the UASD -- one of those City College types who's been in school eleven years and is always five credits shy of a degree. Students today don't mean na; but in Latin America whipped into a frenzy by the fall of Arbenz, by the stoning of Nixon, by the Guerillas of the Sierra Madre, by the endless cynical maneuverings of the Yankee Pig Dogs -- in a Latin America already a year and a half into the Decade of Guerilla -- a student was something else altogether, an agent for change, a quantum string in the staid Newtonian universe. Such a student was Arquimedes. He also listened to the shortwave, but not for Dodgers scores; what he risked his life for was the news leaking out of Havana, news of the future. Arquemides was, therefore, a student, the son of a Zapatero and a midwife, a tirapiedra and a quemagoma for life. Being a student wasn't a joke, not with Trujillo and Johnny Abbes scooping up everybody following the foiled Cuban Invasion of 1959."
— Junot Díaz

"That's life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep it 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 Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten miooion Trujillos is all we are."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
But your yourself sucks!
It is lamentably all I have.
"
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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."
— Junot Díaz

"Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their t of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

"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."
— Junot Díaz

"I covered her hand in mine and she gave me this frustrated heart-wrenching look like she was already on her way down with me and didn't, for the life of her, understand why.

It's OK, I said.

No, it's fucking not OK. You're too short. But she didn't take her hand away."
— Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)