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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
Begin
Serious
Trouble
Practice
Oppressions
Possessive
Muscles
Oppression
Investment

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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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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Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
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My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.
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This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.
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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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That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
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I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.
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Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
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God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
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I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
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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
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You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.
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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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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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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.
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Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
Junot Diaz
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The half-life of love is forever.
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I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.
Junot Diaz