Junot Diaz Quotes - Page 2

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

I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.

I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.

I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.

Every time you hear anyone talk about the Caribbean, whether it's Caribbeans themselves or people outside, there's always talk about women's bodies. Talk about this voluptuousness, this kind of stereotype of what a Caribbean person is. And I think these are stereotypes that even people inside the culture, we actually sometimes claim them and we're very proud.

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

...sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.

I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.

I'm part of the people who are more neutral. I'm just waiting for the dust to settle so that we can turn our guns against the Republicans.

Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.

Anger has a way of returning.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.

There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.