Drown Quotes

“Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“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

“We’re all under the streetlamps, everyone’s the color of day-old piss. When I’m fifty, this is how I’ll remember my friends: tired and yellow and drunk.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“I used to think those were the barrio rules, Latinos and blacks in, whites out —a place we down cats weren’t supposed to go. But love teaches you. Clears your head of any rules.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“Anger has a way of returning.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else Gustavo Pérez Firmat”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“Mami must have caught me studying her because she stopped what she was doing and gave me a smile, maybe her first one of the night. Suddenly I wanted to go over and hug her, for no other reason than I loved her.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“on the plane he had been confident. He'd talked to the vieja near the aisle, telling her how excited he was. It is always good to return home, she said tremulously. I come back anytime I can, which isn't so much anymore. Things aren't good. Seeing the country he'd been born in, seeing his people in charge of everything, he was unprepared for it. The air whooshed out of his lungs. For nearly four years he'd not spoken his Spanish loudly in front of the Northamericans and now he was hearing it bellowed and flung from every mouth. His pores opened, dousing him as he hadn't been doused in years. An awful heat was on the city and the red dust dried out his throat and clogged his nose. The poverty- the unwashed children pointing sullenly at his new shoes, the familias slouching in hovels- was familiar and stifling.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“They sounded a lot like me and my old girlfriend Loretta, but I swore to myself that I would stop thinking about her ass, even though every Cleopatra-looking Latina in the city made me stop and wish she would come back to me.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“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 Díaz, Drown

“We were on our way to the colmado for an errand.”
― Junot Diaz, Drown

“Mami might have been skinny, a bad thing on the Island, but she was smart and funny and that's hard to find anywhere.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“People like her got addictive personalities.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“We all do shit like this, stuff that’s no good for you. You do it and then there’s no feeling positive about it afterwards.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“Most people don't realize how sophisticated pool tables are. Yes, tables have bolts and staples on the rails but these suckers hold together mostly by gravity and by the precision of their construction. If you treat a good table right it will outlast you. Believe me. Cathedrals are built like that. There are Incan roads in the Andes that even today you couldn't work a knife between two of the cobblestones. The sewers that the Romans built in Bath were so good that they weren't replaced until the 1950's. That's the sort of thing that I can believe in.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“The skies will be magnificent. Pollutants have made Jersey sunsets one of the wonders of the world. Point it out. Touch her shoulder and say, That's nice, right?”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“. . . with the sun sliding out of the sky like spit off a wall . . .”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“What can you do? Tomás said. Life smacks everybody around.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown