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'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Novel
Oscar
Terrible
Oscars
Example
Distress
Write
Novels
Wanted
Happenings
Writing
Period
Happening
Periods

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I think men spend so much time passing for being men.
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Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.
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If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.
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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.
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Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory you won't see it often.
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I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
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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.
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Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.
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The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.
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You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.
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Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
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She's applying her lipstick I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
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The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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Privilege does not operate without silence.
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The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.
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It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.
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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.
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A person doesn't mourn forever.
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Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.
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