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...

He’s really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a...

Deep down, where my boys don’t know me, I’m an optimist.

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...

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There’s a lot out there.

Entonces cállate la fucking boca.

Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.

Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral:...

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won’t see it often.

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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....

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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,...

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

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

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.