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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.

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
Two
Spanish
Book
Racism
Think
Sentences
Thinking
Third
People
Thirds
Taking
Read
White

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
Junot Diaz
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When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
Junot Diaz
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I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
Junot Diaz
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New Jersey is to New York what Santo Domingo is to the United States. I always felt that those two landscapes, not only just the landscapes themselves but their relationships to what we would call 'a center' or 'the center of the universe,' has in some ways defined my artistic and critical vision.
Junot Diaz
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I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy.
Junot Diaz
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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 Diaz
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The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Junot Diaz
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[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
Junot Diaz
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A person doesn't mourn forever.
Junot Diaz
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You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
Junot Diaz
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I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
Junot Diaz
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Nilda is watching the ground as though she's afraid she might fall. My heart is beating and I think, We could do anything. We could marry. We could drive off to the West Coast. We could start over. It's all possible but neither of us speaks for a long time and the moment closes and we're back in the world we've always known.
Junot Diaz
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I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
Junot Diaz
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As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
Junot Diaz
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I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.
Junot Diaz
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I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished Drown was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.
Junot Diaz
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Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.
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.
Junot Diaz