She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
If you didn’t grow up like I did then you don’t know, and if you don’t know it’s probably better you don’t judge.
Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either.
Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
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.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.
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.
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.
A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.
That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn’t do school anymore. Something inside wouldn’t let me.
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There’s a lot out there.
I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.
I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed?
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.
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
You don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.
if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
But beautiful girl above all beautiful girls,’ he wrote back, ‘This is my home.
Sure, I liked girls but I was always too terrified to speak to them unless we were arguing or I was calling them stupidos, which was one of my favorite words that year.
You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i’ll want to see you every day. At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.
It’s just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.
My heart is beating like it’s lonely, like there’s nothing else inside of me.
And all I did was read, and when I was too high to read I stared out the windows.
She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.
You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day.
Deep down, where my boys don’t know me, I’m an optimist.
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.
Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.
She’d never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she’d had one handy.
You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.
Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.
Waited for my brother and didn’t talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she’d always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn’t talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories.
…and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.
Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won’t ever have trouble finding men.
He’s really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.
Don’t panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I’m from the Dominican Republic. They’re the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.
The next day he woke up feeling like he’d been unshackled from his fat, like he’d been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn’t remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
…what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-…
Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.