398 Quotes by Junot Díaz

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.

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

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you're allergic to is trying.

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

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

Everyone warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.