A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

— Junot Díaz

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 you're frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable.

— Junot Díaz

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great, but she has to start being realistic. . . . . Later you see her with said classmate on the Yard. He's even lighter than you, but he still looks unquestionably black. He's also like nine feet tall and put together like an anatomy primer. They are walking hand in hand, and she looks so very happy that you try to find the space in your heart not to begrudge her.

— Junot Díaz

And all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.

— Junot Díaz

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the surrounding air, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely radar.

— Junot Díaz

Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men.

— Junot Díaz

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hepatic Felicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Beatrix had, in her making, blinked.

— Junot Díaz

Before we even swung onto 516 Hilda was in my brother's lap, and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what's wrong with women.

— Junot Díaz

But beautiful girl above all beautiful girls,' he wrote back, 'This is my home.

— Junot Díaz

But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

— Junot Díaz