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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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Junot Diaz
Age: 55
Born: 1968
Born: December 31
Faculty Member
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic
Junot Diaz
Done
Eye
Turning
Way
Beautiful
Worthy
Always
Thought
Mistakes
Love
Stills
Blind
Thinking
Problem
Crime
Still
Mistake
Everything
Seeing
Country
Wrong
Crimes

More quotes by Junot Diaz

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Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
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In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.
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Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
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For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
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You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
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She had reason to doubt him he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
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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.
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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.
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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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The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
Junot Diaz
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I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
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I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.
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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Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.
Junot Diaz
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I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
Junot Diaz
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The half-life of love is forever.
Junot Diaz
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We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.
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Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
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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My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.
Junot Diaz