398 Quotes by Junot Díaz

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.

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn’t come.

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

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.

A person doesn’t mourn forever.

If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt – at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt – was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.

In minority communities there’s a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There’s a misunderstanding of what an artist does.

I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It’s like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.