Top 180 Junot Díaz Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

52. “I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.”

— Junot Díaz

53. “When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That’s what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.”

— Junot Díaz

54. “We’re accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I’m sure that’s not any different for anyone else.”

— Junot Díaz

55. “I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.”

— Junot Díaz

56. “You don’t want to let go, but don’t want to be hurt, either. It’s not a great place to be but what can I tell you?”

— Junot Díaz

57. “You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i’ll want to see you every day. At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.”

— Junot Díaz

58. “Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”

— Junot Díaz

59. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

60. “She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”

— Junot Díaz

61. “It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.”

— Junot Díaz

62. “She’s applying her lipstick; I’ve always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.”

— Junot Díaz

63. “Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they’re definitely not told to see them.”

— Junot Díaz

64. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

65. “Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.”

— Junot Díaz

66. “What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.”

— Junot Díaz

67. “As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.”

— Junot Díaz

68. “Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won’t see it often.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

70. “Privilege does not operate without silence.”

— Junot Díaz

71. “Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.”

— Junot Díaz

72. “I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.”

— Junot Díaz

73. “Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.”

— Junot Díaz

74. “Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.”

— Junot Díaz

75. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

77. “You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it? There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a matter of will power: The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.”

— Junot Díaz

78. “You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There’s a lot out there.”

— Junot Díaz

79. “Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.”

— Junot Díaz

80. “Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”

— Junot Díaz

81. “When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked – that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.”

— Junot Díaz

82. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.”

— Junot Díaz

83. “Books don’t live and die by awards. You don’t listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.”

— Junot Díaz

84. “I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing.”

— Junot Díaz

85. “You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.”

— Junot Díaz

86. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz

88. “New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It’s old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.”

— Junot Díaz

89. “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.”

— Junot Díaz

90. “Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.”

— Junot Díaz

91. “My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.”

— Junot Díaz

92. “Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations – but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.”

— Junot Díaz

93. “Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.”

— Junot Díaz

94. “I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.”

— Junot Díaz

95. “Shot at twenty-seven times – what a Dominican number...”

— Junot Díaz

96. “There’s little question that short stories, like poetry, don’t get the respect they deserve in the culture – but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.”

— Junot Díaz

97. “If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you’re not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain’t different or original.”

— Junot Díaz

98. “My thing is, I’m just way too harsh. It’s an enormous impediment, and that’s just the truth of it. It doesn’t make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn’t more valorous. I have a character defect, man.”

— Junot Díaz

99. “I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.”

— Junot Díaz

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

— Junot Díaz