Top 323 Quotes & Sayings by Junot Diaz - Page 5

Character is the plot in many ways

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

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.

We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We’ve got to deal with this reality. We’ve got to extend the franchise.

We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.

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.

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.

As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That was like the only black book we read in high school...

I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

Mexico City is the center of art and culture and politics and has been and continues to be for Latin America in a way that I think really called to me as an artistic person, as someone that was interested in the politics of Latin America, you know. God, every single famous person in Latin American history and art and politics seems to have found their way to Mexico City.

...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.

You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

I'm really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I'm one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school. And the scary part is that I was one of those kids who always tested really well. You put a test in front of me, and I would have been like do-do-do-do-do. I probably would have been some community lawyer somewhere - if anything, that's probably what I would have been doing.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.

An ear will never do you wrong, but I know writers who... most of the language they use is just extracted language from other languages they've read. I am a big-time reader, but I mix and match.

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.

Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.

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.

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.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.

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

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.

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

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

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.)

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

...one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

You can't be a human without seeing.

Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.

You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.

We're on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we're still good, next week maybe. That's the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

The body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we're human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect.

I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

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.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

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

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

I mean, I’m an artist by nature, no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing.

You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don't, people will scorn you for it.