The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Quotes

“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

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

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

“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

“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

“It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.”
― 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

“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

“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

“The beauty! The beauty!”
― Junot Díaz, La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao

“They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. He tried to stand bravely... They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they'd started to dream the same dreams and say the same words. He told them that it was only because of her love that he'd been able to do the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, told them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn't b no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he'd be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be.

They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what "fuego" means in English.

Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself.

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

“...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

“The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.”
― 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

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

“Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”
― 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

“She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. 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

“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