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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.

Junot Diaz

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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Feels
Chests
Mamma
Really
Pairs
Mia
Men
Contemporary
Bookish
Like
Wings
Tentacles
Smart
Ghetto
Color
Bats
Boys
Pair
Growing
Chest

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.
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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
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In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
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The half-life of love is forever.
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
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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.
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It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)
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I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
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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.
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For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.
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I spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, Eh, no one else likes to read but me I must be crazy!
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John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.
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Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.
Junot Diaz
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Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Diaz
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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
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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.
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We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.
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If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves
Junot Diaz
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Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston.
Junot Diaz