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)-…

Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it...

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...

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.

After his initial homecoming week, after he’d been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he’d gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters...

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.

We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter what truths these languages might be carrying. If you talk with a harsh, urbanized accent and you...

Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would...

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he’d jumped off...

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 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...

Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother’s lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting...

Ana Iris perguntou-me se eu o amava e eu falei-lhe das l mpadas na minha antiga casa na capital, que estavam sempre a tremeluzir e uma pessoa nunca sabia se a luz se iria ou...

A month later the law student leaves you for one of her classmates, tells you that it was great but she has to start being realistic. . . . .Later you see her with said...

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...

Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is going...

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...

We’re on speaking terms today. I say, Maybe we should hang out with the boys, and you shake your head. I want to spend time with you, you say. If we’re still good, next week...

She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

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 flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World’. To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled...