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Do You Remember? When The Fights Seemed To Go On And On, And Always Ended With Us In Bed, Tearing At Each Other Like Maybe That Could Change Everything. In A Couple Of Months You'd Be Seeing Somebody Else And I Would Too; She Was No Darker Than You But She Washed Her Panties In The Shower And Had Hair Like A Sea Of Little Punos And The First Time You Saw Us, You Turned Around And Boarded A Bus I Knew You Didn't Have To Take. When My Girl Said, Who Was That? I Said, Just Some Girl.

-Junot Diaz

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Do You Remember? When

Junot Diaz

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Do You Remember? When The Fights Seemed To Go On And On, And Always Ended With Us In Bed, Tearing At Each Other Like Maybe That Could Change Everything. In A Couple Of Months You'd Be Seeing Somebody Else And I Would Too; She Was No Darker Than You But She Washed Her Panties In The Shower And Had Hair Like A Sea Of Little Punos And The First Time You Saw Us, You Turned Around And Boarded A Bus I Knew You Didn't Have To Take. When My Girl Said, Who Was That? I Said, Just Some Girl.

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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.

I Think That Most Of Us Are Aware That As Writers We Are Seeking Absences, We're Seeking Silences, We're Seeking Spaces That People Haven't Entered. No Writer Is Saying, "hey, I Want To Go To This Very Well Trod Territory And Say Exactly What Someone Else Has Done." I Think The Nature Of A Writer, Because We Are Attempting To Bring To Light Areas That People Haven't Seen Before, Tends In Some Ways To Be Progressive, At Least In That Light.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

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Out Of Nowhere You Said, I Love You. For Whatever It's Worth.

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If You Were A Nerd Computer Geek In 1982, The Amount Of Isolation You Felt - At Least What I Experienced, Or The Kids I Knew, The Isolation They Felt - Was Almost Total. They Were Not Part Of Society; No One Thought They Were Cool.

Sometimes You Just Have To Try, Even If You Know It Won’t Work.

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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.

I Didn't Start Writing Until Late High School And Then I Was Just Diddling. Mainly I Loved To Read And My Writing Was An Outgrowth Of That.

Run A Hand Through Your Hair, Like The White Boys Do, Even Though The Only Thing That Runs Easily Through Your Hair Is Africa.

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

I Mean, The Nation In Which We Live - And The World In Which We Live - Is So Extraordinarily More Like A Future Than The Futures That We're Being Sold On The Screen And On Television.

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People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong.

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.

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My Mother Took Care Of Us Until My Father Scrammed, And Then She Ended Up Working In The Small-factory Sector Of New Jersey With A Lot Of Other Immigrants.

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Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

A Form Wherein We Can Enjoy Simultaneously What Is Best In Both The Novel And The Short Story Form. My Plan Was To Create A Book That Affords Readers Some Of The Novel's Long-form Pleasures But That Also Contains The Short Story's Ability To Capture What Is So Difficult About Being Human - The Brevity Of Our Moments, Their Cruel Irrevocability.

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Love Is The Only Thing - I Don't Want To Say That "makes It Bearable" - But I Feel Like Without The Possibility Of Love, This Place Would Just Devour Us.

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Being An Author Is Always Like Being A Well-run Dictatorship - It's All One Person Speaking.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

I Seem To Have To Make My Characters Family Before I Can Access Their Hearts In Any Way That Matters.

When I Read Toni Morrison And Sandra Cisneros As A Freshman At Rutgers, It All Clicked - That Writing Was All I Wanted To Do. It Became My Calling.

The Body Is What Reminds Us On A Daily Basis That We're Human. The Body Defies Us, It Betrays Us, We Have To Struggle With It, You Know. And It Reveals In Curious And In Abiding Ways How We Are Not Perfect.

...sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

Shot At Twenty-seven Times - What A Dominican Number.

The Art Is Just Really Mysterious. If I Understood It More, Maybe I Would Write More.

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.

I Love “the Autobiography Of Malcolm X.” That Was Like The Only Black Book We Read In High School...

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.

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.

- Nothing Else Has Any Efficacy, I Might As Well Be Myself. - But Your Yourself Sucks! - It Is, Lamentably, All I Have.

And Because Love, Real Love, Is Not So Easily Shed.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men. There's A Sense Among Many Writers Of Color That The Most Invisible Figure That Was Sitting Between All Of Us Was The Nerd. But It Was The Thing We Weren't Saying, That People Were Afraid To Say, Like, "yo, What We Do Is Nerdy By Definition."

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I'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

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I Think That Distance Is Good For Some People For Certain Projects. I Mean This Is Sort Of A Dynamic Question. Some Projects Require More Distance Than Others, Some Don't Require It At All. Sometimes You Need It And Sometimes You Don't.

When I Write, What I Long For Is Not More Realism Or Fiction But More Courage. That's What I Always Find Myself Short On And What I Have To Struggle To Achieve In Order That The Work Might Live.

[the Biggest Disappointment Is] That He [barack Obama] Deported Everybody And Their Grandmother.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

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This Is What I Know: People's Hopes Go On Forever.

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Contemplative Life

Here At Last Is Her Smile: Burn It Into Your Memory; You Won't See It Often.

Love Is The Great Test Of The Human. The Human Is Tested By Our Ability To Withstand Love. Love Is So Difficult, It Is So Challenging, It Demands Of Us That We Wreck It With Ourselves. It Demands Of Us An Honesty That Few Of Us Could Sustain.

So The Kind Of Boy I Was, Or That I Was Told To Be, You Were Kind Of This Like Half-gladiator, Half-dude Who, You Know, Was Supposed To Have As Many Girls As Possible And Work Until Your Heart Exploded, Have No Fear, You Know.

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.

'a Princess Of Mars' May Not Have Exerted The Same Colossal Pull That Tarzan Had On The Global Imagination, But Its Influence On Generations Of Readers Cannot Be Underestimated.

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.

I'm Like Everybody Else: Weak, Full Of Mistakes, But Basically Good.

I Feel Most Like Myself... After I Run - I Go Out For Five Miles Every Morning.

Nothing More Exhilarating ... Than Saving Yourself By The Simple Act Of Waking.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men.

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.

Cities Produce Love And Yet Feel None. A Strange Thing When You Think About It, But Perhaps Fitting. Cities Need That Love More Than Most Of Us Care To Imagine. Cities, After All, For All Their Massiveness, All Their There-ness, Are Acutely Vulnerable.

I Was Neither Black Enough For The Black Kids Or Dominican Enough For The Dominican Kids. I Didn't Have A Safe Category.

I Never Wanted To Be Away From The Family. Intuitively, I Knew How Easily Distances Could Harden And Become Permanent.

Nobody Warned Me That When You Fall In Love, You Really Fall In Love Forever.

Falling In Love

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

Stories Are Hard. I Have Friends Who Knock Out Stories On A Weekly Or Monthly Basis, Like They're Running On Medicinal-strength Updike. But For Me A Story Is As Daunting A Prospect As A Novel.

Know That In This World There's Somebody Who Will Always Love You.

When You're The Ones In The Life Raft And You Have Four Or Five Women In The Life Raft Who Put It Together, By The End Of It Your Nerves Are Blown. The People You're Going To Attack Are The People Who Are Helping You, Who You Are Holding It Together With.

Part Of It Is Eight Years Of A Black President, And White America Still Lost Their [minds] About That. Part Of It Is A Republican Politics Of Vicious, Vicious Partisan [stuff] That Has Completely Poisoned What We Would Call The Political Rhetorical Sphere. All Of These Things Come Together In A Perfect Storm.

But Back Then, In Those First Days, I Was So Alone That Every Day Was Like Eating My Own Heart.

You're Dominican Only If You Do This, This, And That. And If You Do This And That, You'll Be Accepted To A Certain Degree And If You Don't, People Will Scorn You For It.

You Never Forget The Discovery Years. First Kisses. The First Time You Try Certain Foods.

Each Morning, Before Jackie Started Her Studies, She Wrote On A Clean Piece Of Paper: Tarde Venientibus Ossa. To The Latecomers Are Left The Bones.

It's Just A Matter Of Willpower. The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

She's Applying Her Lipstick; I've Always Believed That The Universe Invented The Color Red Solely For Latinas.

When People Are Always Telling You That You Have To Have A Lot Of Women, Women Are Very Important, There's A Chance That You Might Actually Begin To Observe Them On A More Fundamental Level. Then You Get So Much Focus That One Day You Might Actually See. Dominican Men Are Told To Look At Women All The Time, But They're Definitely Not Told To See Them.

My Thing Is Every Generation Of Americans Has To Answer What We Call The 'superman Question.' Superman Comes, Lands In America. He's Illegal. He's One Of These Kids. He's Wrapped Up In A Red Bullfighter's Cape. And You've Got To Decide What We're Gonna Do With Superman.

I Think What Happened To Me Was That I Was Always Being Taught To Look, But One Day I Started To See. And It Was Because A Lot Of Women In My Life Were Refusing Just To Be Looked At, To Be This Passive Figure.

Literature Is Less Involved In Giving You Answers And More Dedicated To Giving You Insight.

I Was Really Drawn To Thinking About The Women In My Life. Thinking About My Mother, Who's A Very Powerful Force On Me. And I Have These Two Very Strong Sisters Who Took Up A Lot Of Imaginary Space In My Life.

You Were At The Age Where You Could Fall In Love With A Girl Over An Expression, Over A Gesture

Falling In Love

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.

But If These Years Have Taught Me Anything It Is This: You Can Never Run Away. Not Ever. The Only Way Out Is In.

I Find Reading To Be A Delight, A Source Of Comfort, A Way To Explore.

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Delphine De Girardin

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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