Junot Diaz

“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.”

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

“And the roaches. The roaches were so bold in his flat that turning on the lights did not startle them. They waved their three-inch antennas as if to say, Hey, puto, turn that shit off.”

“Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.”

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

“You were sixteen years old and you were messed up and alone like a motherfucker. You were also convinced - like totally utterly convinced - that the world was going to blow itself to pieces.”

“We were about to hit the door when she returned, panting, an envelope of cold around her.Where did you go? I asked.I went for a walk. She dropped her coat at the door; her face was red from the cold and she was breathing deeply, as if she’d sprinted the last thirty steps.Where?Just around the corner.Why the hell did you do that?She started to cry, and when Rafa put his hand on her waist, she slapped it away. We went back to our room.I think she’s losing it, I said.She’s just lonely, Rafa said.”

“That must have been some serious Island voodoo: the ending I saw in the cave came true. The next day we went back to the United States. Five months later I got a letter from my ex-baby. I was dating someone new, but Magda’s handwriting still blasted every molecule of air out of my lungs.It turned out she was also going out with somebody else. A very nice guy she’d met. Dominican, like me. Except he loves me, she wrote.But I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to finish by showing you what kind of fool I was.When I returned to the bungalow that night, Magda was waiting up for me. Was packed, looked like she’d been bawling.I’m going home tomorrow, she said.I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.”

“Stared at the toothpick-thin blackgirl who worked at the Friendly's, whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak.”

“They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú - generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since.”

“You breathe nonstop, like a marathon runner, but it doesn't help.”

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

“And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.”

“Maybe we were together some other time.I can’t think when, I said.You tried not to look at me. Maybe five million years ago.People weren’t even people back then.”

“The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.”

“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.”

“Al fin y al cabo, al éxito le encanta tener testigos, pero el fracaso no puede existir sin ellos”

“I never see the sick;” Yasmin says. “They visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and the dying … Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You’d think, given the blood we see, that there’s a great war going on out in the world. Just the one inside of bodies, the new girl says.”

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

“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.”

“In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

“Like they say: los que menos corren, vuelan.”

“It would have broken my heart if it hadn't been so damn familiar. I guess I'd gotten numb to that sort of thing. I had heart-leather like walruses got blubber.”

“She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.”

“The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever.It's a start, you say to the room....In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace-- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

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

“In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.”

“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.”

“...a particularly Jersey malaise--the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.”

“We’re all under the streetlamps, everyone’s the color of day-old piss. When I’m fifty, this is how I’ll remember my friends: tired and yellow and drunk.”

“That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work. Because it feels like hope, like grace--- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”

“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”

“A person doesn't mourn forever.”

“She blew out of the Terrace sometime before Christmas to points unknown. The Gujarati guy told me when I ran into him at the Pathmark. He was still pissed because Pura had stiffed him almost two months' rent.Last time I ever rent to one of you people.Amen, I said.”

“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.”

“It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.”

“That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.”

“I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?”

“Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”

“I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.”

“Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.”

“Baby, you say, baby this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.”

“You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.”

“Entonces cállate la fucking boca.”

“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.”

“Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.”

“but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”

“Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.”

“I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”

“One of the ex-sucias publishes a poem about you online. It's called "El Puto”