Junot Diaz

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

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

You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. 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.

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.

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?

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.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

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.

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.

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.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.