The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Quotes

“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

“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.”
― 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

“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, 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

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

“- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself.
- But your yourself sucks!
- It is, lamentably, all I have.”
― Junot Diaz, 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

“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 Diaz, 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 tentacles growing out of your chest.”
― Junot Diaz, 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

“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

“...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.”
― 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

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

“Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.”
― 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

“Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.”
― 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

“Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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 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

“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

“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