Junot Diaz Quotes - Page 10

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

The people I know who would support [Donald] Trump are keeping their mouths shut.

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.

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

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.

I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.

This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.

Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.

Love is the only thing - I don't want to say that "makes it bearable" - but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

You can't be a human without seeing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

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