I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

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.

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.

She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.

You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin.

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.

You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It’s just a...

…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.

There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of catastrophe, but she was one of the few who didn’t have children, who lived alone, who was still...

They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a...

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...

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed?

I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater’s guide to love.You think?I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors....

It’s just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.

Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won’t ever have trouble finding men.

Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn’t like children.Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured...

You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its ass. Ouch. You would...

You can’t regret the life you didn’t lead.

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.

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...

I always hated obvious dreams like that. I still do.

My heart is beating like it’s lonely, like there’s nothing else inside of me.

I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it’s too fucking late but the boys weren’t into melodrama. They heard that shit...

Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn’t mean you don’t have them.

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,...

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.

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...

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky...

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was...

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.

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.

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you’re allergic to is trying.

Our relationship wasn’t the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn’t bullshit, either.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which...

I certainly couldn’t have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain–abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer–the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically,...

Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you,...

I felt like summer had taken me over.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was...

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.

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.

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he’d fallen into one of those Let’s Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love’s version of a stay in the stocks, in you go,...

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 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...

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.

…what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-…