398 Quotes by Junot Díaz

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.

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

He was like all boys: beautiful and callow, and like an insect he couldn't sit still.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.

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.

She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.

I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it's too fucking late but the boys weren't into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.