Quotes by Dominican Authors

I am the only real truth I know.
Jean Rhys
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
Junot Díaz
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.
Junot Díaz
The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.
Raquel Cepeda
...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...
Junot Díaz
Sometimes opposites attract, or so they say, but Paloma and Rocío were like arroz and mangú: they didn’t really mix well.
Raquel Cepeda
For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.
Jean Rhys
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.
Junot Díaz
It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?
Jean Rhys
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.
Junot Díaz
But in the daytime it was all right. And when you'd had a drink you knew it was the best way to live in the world because anything might happen. I don't know how people live when they know exactly what's going to happen to them each day.
Jean Rhys
Hip-hop, this thing we love that loves us back, is our lingua franca.
Raquel Cepeda
We aren’t encouraged to think for ourselves and ask questions. We are expected to accept what they teach us as infallible truths.
Raquel Cepeda
You are meant to be, despite how you got here; you’ll see someday.
Raquel Cepeda
Women destroy me. I allow them to.
Raquel Cepeda
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 demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú - generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since.
Junot Díaz
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.
Junot Díaz
Left alone, Miss Verney felt so old, lonely and helpless that she began to cry. No builder would tackle that shed, not for any price she could afford. But crying relieved her and she soon felt quite cheerful again. It was ridiculous to brood, she told herself.
Jean Rhys
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.
Junot Díaz
Shakespeare had it right all along: Love will kill you in the end.
Raquel Cepeda
I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.
Jean Rhys
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 and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.
Junot Díaz
Even the one moment that you thought was your eternity fades out and is forgotten and dies.
Jean Rhys
Walk like you have three men walking behind you.
Oscar de la Renta
He's really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.
Junot Díaz
Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men.
Junot Díaz
...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.
Junot Díaz
To guess is no good, but to anticipate is GREAT.
Filipe Alou
Something came out from my heart into my throat and then into my eyes.
Jean Rhys
May you tear each other to bits, you damned hyenas, and the quicker the better. Let it be destroyed. Let it happen. Let it end, this cold insanity.
Jean Rhys
She who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead.
Claudio Encarnacion Montero
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.
Junot Díaz
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, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Díaz
And what does anyone know about traitors, or why Judas did what he did?
Jean Rhys
Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.
Raquel Cepeda
Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.
Junot Díaz
The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset...Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses...When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned.
Jean Rhys
When I was out on the battlements it was cool and I could hardly hear them. I sat there quietly. I don't know how long I sat. Then I turned round and saw the sky. It was red and all my life was in it.
Jean Rhys
As soon as I turned the key I saw it hanging, the color of fire and sunset. the colour of flamboyant flowers. ‘If you are buried under a flamboyant tree, ‘ I said, ‘your soul is lifted up when it flowers. Everyone wants that.’She shook her head but she did not move or touch me.
Jean Rhys
I want more of this feeling - fire and wings.
Jean Rhys
Your red dress,’ she said, and laughed.But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.
Jean Rhys
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.
Junot Díaz
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 maybe.That's the most we can hope for. Nothing thrown, nothing said that we might remember for years. You watch me while you put a brush through your hair. Each strand that breaks is as long as my arm. You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?
Junot Díaz
Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?
Jean Rhys
Nobody, she felt, understood her--not her mother, not her father, not her sister or brother, none of the girls or boys at school, nadie--except her man.
Raquel Cepeda
When trouble comes, close ranks
Jean Rhys
What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing.
Jean Rhys
This is what I know about my parents. They spent the next several years trying to forget each other, and me.
Raquel Cepeda
She looks like an empty shell of a woman with her soul hovering above her. We believe in spiritual guías in Santo Domingo. Hers is her own self. I can see Mami’s soul desperately trying to find its way back into her small body.
Raquel Cepeda
Now, money, for the night is coming. Money for my hair, money for my teeth, money for shoes that won't deform my feet (it's not so easy now to walk around in cheap shoes with very high heels), money for good clothes, money, money. The night is coming.
Jean Rhys
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 he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.
Junot Díaz
Dreams are the fingerprints of your future
Pedro Luis Adames Valdez
Listen kid, it’s just you and me now, so let’s help each other out. Always be honest with me, and show me how to be the mother and father I never had. I’ll make a mess of things sometimes, and I’m sorry in advance, but I’ll try. My word is bond.
Raquel Cepeda
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.
Junot Díaz
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.
Junot Díaz
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.
Junot Díaz
And then the days came when I was alone.
Jean Rhys
Quite alone. No voice, no touch, no hand....How long must I lie here? For ever? No, only for a couple of hundred years this time, miss....
Jean Rhys
Now I no longer wish to be loved, beautiful, happy or successful. I want one thing and one thing only - to be left alone.
Jean Rhys
And I’ll look back at him because I shan’t be able to help it, remembering about being young, and about being made love to and making love, about pain and dancing and not being afraid of death, about all music I’ve ever loved, and every time I’ve been happy.
Jean Rhys