Junot Diaz Quotes

213 quotes in 2609 categories

• The only way out is in.
• 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…
• Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.
• 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…
• 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…
• ...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...
• But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
• 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.
• 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.…
• 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…
• You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
• What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
• - Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.
• 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…
• ...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.
• 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,…

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