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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.

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
Possessive
Muscles
Oppression
Investment
Begin
Serious
Trouble
Practice
Oppressions

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
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 can't be a human without seeing.
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Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.
Junot Diaz
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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.
Junot Diaz
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She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Junot Diaz
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I always wanted to read. I always thought I was going to be a historian. I would go to school and study history and then end up in law school, once, I ran out of loot trying to be a history high school teacher. But my dream was always to place myself in a situation where I was always surrounded by books.
Junot Diaz
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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 Diaz
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I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
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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Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
Junot Diaz
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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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Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.
Junot Diaz
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The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.
Junot Diaz
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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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The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
Junot Diaz
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Junot Diaz
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I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.
Junot Diaz
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I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
Junot Diaz