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Junot Díaz QUOTES

Junot Díaz QUOTES

181 " 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

182 " Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

183 " 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

184 " 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

185 " Maybe we were together some other time.
I can’t think when, I said.
You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.
People weren’t even people back then. "

― Junot Díaz , This Is How You Lose Her

186 " But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

187 " No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

188 " Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number... "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

189 " Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

190 " 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

191 " You can’t find intimacy—you can’t find home—when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood. "

― Junot Díaz

192 " You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

193 " 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

194 " 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 oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve. "

― Junot Díaz

195 " I felt like summer had taken me over. "

― Junot Díaz , This Is How You Lose Her

196 " The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art. "

― Junot Díaz

197 " Only Puerto Rican girl on the earth who wouldn't give up the ass for any reason. I can't, she said. I can't make any mistakes. ...Paloma was convinced that if she made any mistakes in the next two years, any mistakes at all, she would be stuck in that family of hers forever. That was her nightmare. Imagine if I don't get in anywhere, she said. You'd still have me, you tried to reassure her, but Paloma looked at you like the apocalypse would be preferable. "

― Junot Díaz , This Is How You Lose Her

198 " A romantic she was, but not a pendeja. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

199 " Love. Oscar knew he should have checked out right then. He liked to kid himself that it was only cold anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself. He was totally and irrevocably in love with Ana. What he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared to the amor he was carrying in his heart for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The only thing that came close to how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and everything he hoped to write came even close. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

200 " Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow. "

― Junot Díaz , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao