Junot Díaz > Quotes

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
― 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

“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 Díaz

“You can't regret the life you didn't lead.”
― Junot Díaz

“- 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

“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

“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

“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. 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.”
― 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

“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

“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

“It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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

“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

“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

“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 Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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

“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

“Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I'd finally try to say the words that could have saved us.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The beauty! The beauty!”
― Junot Díaz, La Breve Y Maravillosa Vida De Óscar Waouna Novela

“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

“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

“...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“The only way out is in.”
― 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

“Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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.”
― Junot Díaz

“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

“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.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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 Díaz, Drown

“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.

And that's what I guess these stories are all about.

Yes, no doubt about it: I would have run. La Inca or not, I would have run.”
― Junot Díaz

“Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:

When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky if we can understand 20 percent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages escape us. I mean we’re not perfect, we’re not gods. But on top of that people mis-speak, sometimes you mis-hear, sometimes you don’t have attention, sometimes people use words you don’t know. Sometimes people use languages you don’t know. On a daily basis, human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication, which is incomprehensibility, incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative comprehension an immigrant fears that they’re not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language.

And what’s a normal component in communication, incomprehension, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety because you’re not sure if it’s just incomprehension or your own failures. My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn’t have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people. which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What’s funny is, will Ramona accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and will greet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words what we’re comfortable with out in the outside world, we do not want to encounter in our books.

So I’m constantly, people have come to me and asked me… is this, are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader, you know? And I’m like, no? I assume any gaps in a story and words people don’t understand, whether it’s the nerdish stuff, whether it’s the Elvish, whether it’s the character going on about Dungeons and Dragons, whether it’s the Dominican Spanish, whether it’s the sort of high level graduate language, I assume if people don’t get it that this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive. This is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else. For me, words that you can’t understand in a book aren’t there to torture or remind people that they don’t know. I always felt they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. Yeah you may currently practice it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. And what the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you how our whole, lives we’ve always needed someone else to help us with reading.”
― Junot Díaz

“Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was one of those moments that would always be Rutgers for me.”
― 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

“In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion.”
― Junot Díaz

“When you're sixteen a body like this is free; when you're forty it's a full-time occupation.”
― Junot Díaz, the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

“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.”
― Junot Díaz

“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

“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 Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote)than saving yourself by teh simple act of waking.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn't have children, who lived alone, who was still kinda young. Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind, a woman with no child could be explained only by vast untrammelled calamity.

Maybe she just doesn't like children.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.”
― Junot Díaz