The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever.
It's a start, you say to the room.
...In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace-- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.


Junot Díaz

  Email Quote to Friends   Link to Quote   Create Short URL  Publish Text About This Quote   Share on Facebook, Twitter, and more
  See Recommended Quotes For You

Related

The love you get, is equal to the love you give.
BEN OAK
Dont GiVe UP iF U StIll WaNna TrY*
DonT WIpE YOUR TeARS IF YOU StiLL WANT TO Cry
 DON'T SET...
TRENT REZNOR
This was when I learned that you have to give up your life as you know it to get a new one: that som...
KELLY CUTRONE
Long-time viewing of Internet violence tend to change a person's temperament, making the person pron...
YOU QUANXI
If positive and healthy materials are absent, negative materials are sure to be dominant in the cybe...
YOU QUANXI
In a robust global business environment, our business units operated well in the first quarter. More...
HARRY YOU
The Board of Directors and I are pleased to recognize Peter's outstanding contribution to the succes...
HARRY YOU
We are pleased to close the books on 2004 following the painstaking review of almost five years of f...
HARRY YOU
But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heav...
C.S. LEWIS
Dont act like you are walking around with a Tshirt that says "I give Up!" on the front and on the ba...
TIMOTHY PADAYACHEE
The chief beauty about time
is that you cannot waste it in advance.
The next year, the nex...
ARNOLD BENNETT
...it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly lo...
MICHAEL ENDE
Do you know that feeling? When everything you do seems like a struggle. Where you dont wanna leave t...
ANONYMOUS.
I love you in my very own way.
Like a stone loves the mosses around it
Like a sea loves th...
ARZUM UZUN
Oh, by the way, is this your armor? (Grace)
It is, or was. (Julian)
Can we keep it? (Grace...
SHERRILYN KENYON
This is the beginning of a new day.
You have been given this day to use as you will.
You can w...
ANON.
Sharing a room with the person you want most is like sharing a room with an open fire.

He...
RAINBOW ROWELL
Love doesn't give you very many choices. When you love someone, you just want to be with them. If th...
ALYSHA SPEER
So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, ...
NEIL GAIMAN
All that the spider needs to complete its web is step taking
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Just getting back into the game and making it a game is all heart. It feels bad, though, because we ...
ALLEN IVERSON
This is your life. Do what you want and do it often.
If you don't like something, change it. <...
HOLSTEE MANIFESTO
I drove by all the places we used to hang out getting wasted
I thought about our last kiss, how...
5 SECONDS OF SUMMER
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment ...
MILAN KUNDERA
I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ...
KELLY JONES
You must burn. Burn higher.
Burn for everything you have ever wanted. For everything you have ...
MIA HOLLOW
The Type

Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. -Richard Siken SARAH KAY
You don't want to get complacent, because then you start to look lazy on the field and look like you...
ANTWAN PEEK
The best thing you can do for your kids is to show them God working in you on a daily basis.
CRAIG GROESCHEL
Don’t you dare say these times are hollow
Just because there are storms raging by.
Just ...
MELITA TESSY
You should read something else."
Why would he have done that to him?"
I don't know," she s...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
You, in bloom, heart, beloved,
you are like the foliage of the sky over my eyes
and I look...
PABLO NERUDA
Busy in a bus or lacking luck you poke to pluck a pick-up truck.
Utterly shocked you choke in ...
ANA CLAUDIA ANTUNES
I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.
Tell me why you loved...
ANDREA GIBSON
[THE DAILY BREATH]

There are three important periods in your life.

When you e...
DRAGOS BRATASANU
I want you any way I can get you. Not because you’re beautiful or clever or kind or adorable, alth...
LISA KLEYPAS
I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing tha...
RICH MULLINS
eat, baby.
eat.
chew.
please.
I know it hurts. I know it doesn’t feel good. CAITLYN SIEHL
Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you haven't met the inspiration for your main...
JAMIE VARON
Because like the depths of the ocean that calls you home, you will never be easy.

But dar...
JEANETTE LEBLANC
Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
t...
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
When I was a child, an angel came to say,
A true friend is coming my warrior to sweep you away,...
SHANNON L. ALDER
1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2) Start no more new books, add no more new mate...
HENRY MILLER
I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouth...
CLEMENTINE VON RADICS
If you can’t find good in your own country, you won’t find it anywhere
else.”
The wo...
ALAA AL ASWANY
People imagine that there are rituals, like lighting candles or sacrificing chickens. They really ju...
JOHN SCALZI
A lot of teenagers write to me and say "I want to write a book. I want to get published." And those ...
MAUREEN JOHNSON
Have you worked here long?" Sebastian asks.
Just a few months," I say. "Do you come here a lot?...
DEB CALETTI
Decide.

Take one of the most unsettling things you feel exist in your life and decide. DAVID AULT
Loneliness is not the enemy of your joy
as long as you know how you should always destroy
MUNIA KHAN
Don't exist.
Live.
Get out, explore.
Thrive.
Challenge authority. Challenge you...
BRIAN KRANS
We’re all scared.

Yes, all of us. I’m afraid every day. If I’m not afraid, I must n...
RICHIE NORTON
Have you ever
had so much to say
that your mouth closed up tight
struggling to harnes...
ELLEN HOPKINS
Dignity
/ˈdignitē/ noun

1. The moment you realize that the person you cared for h...
SHANNON L. ALDER
Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot ...
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever rea...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are gi...
SARAH DESSEN
Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dream...
LEMONY SNICKET
We do not like the truth because it is simple, we do not want the truth because it is hard, and we d...
PAT WALSH
That thing you thought you'd do
You start to think you can't;
You always say tomorrow,
MARGO T. ROSE
Do me a favor - right now, today, start a list of all your crazy obsessions, the things that get you...
JENNIFER MCMAHON
A kite is a victim you are sure of.
You love it because it pulls
gentle enough to call you...
LEONARD COHEN
I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.
There's Heaven then there's Hell niggas
One da...
JAY-Z
To her-
Hand in hand we come
Christopher Robin and I
To lay this book in your lap. A.A. MILNE
We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it ...
NICK HORNBY
Don't ever give up.
Don't ever give in.
Don't ever stop trying.
Don't ever sell ou...
RICHELLE E. GOODRICH
To all those who care,
You can't forever.
Time steals the years,
And your reflectio...
CRYSTAL WOODS
How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get t...
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
You know they say confession is good for the soul, right?

"I think that applies unless yo...
AMY ANDREWS
You are as you are until you're not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into act...
JAMIE VARON
You start dying slowly
if you do not travel,
if you do not read,
If you do not lis...
MARTHA MEDEIROS
Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Tou...
MEGAN ABBOTT
Did you know that seventy-five to eighty percent of juvenile offenders can’t read at grade level?�...
CAROLEE DEAN
Titus, have you ever had your heart broken?”

“Oh, son. How could you ask a man who us...
ZACK LOVE
You know love is everything you say;
a whisper, a word,
promises you give.
You feel it ...
ENYA
*Talking to Naruto* "Just shut up for once! What the hell do you know about it?! It's not like you e...
SASUKE UCHIHA
I think that many people will intentionally overlook all of the lifeless facts about their relations...
C. JOYBELL C.
Why I Cannot Relate

"What do you think of this piece?" Someone will ask
About some w...
KYLEE CARRIER
If you want to know if someone is lying to you, start by living a truthful life. Once you live in th...
MOLLY FRIEDENFELD
Would you just stay with me?
Stay with you? What for? Look at us! We're already fighting!
...
NICHOLAS SPARKS
You can want, wish, and dream all day,
but those that prepare, work, learn, practice, and prob...
LOREN WEISMAN
Everyone who tried your lemon tart loved it, Henry. It was the perfect excuse for you to talk to the...
N. R. WALKER
There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would li...
LIBBA BRAY
We all know how things work: he's a second-round draft pick, so people want to see him play, ... He ...
CURTIS DELOATCH
when you walk, you look like you’re trying to disappear.
your back is gonna be fucked up.
CAITLYN SIEHL
Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child l...
MARGERY WILLIAMS BIANCO
There will always be those
who say you are too young and delicate
to make anything happen ...
CLEMENTINE VON RADICS
Wake up to a brand new day and realize why you woke up to meet the day! Live to the end of another d...
ERNEST AGYEMANG YEBOAH
Days like this, like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through ...
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biar...
FRANK O'HARA
Laugh, even when you feel too sick or too worn out or tired.
Smile, even when you're trying no...
ALYSHA SPEER
You always want to start fast because it gives you a great opportunity, ... Most importantly in Nove...
SAM ADAMS
... so this is for us.
This is for us who sing, write, dance, act, study, run and love
and...
CHARLOTTE ERIKSSON
Never give up.
It's like breathing—once you quit, your flame dies letting total darkness ext...
RICHELLE E. GOODRICH
But I'm learning it's human nature to want the things you can't have. What changes is how you go abo...
KATIE KACVINSKY
2. We experience bouts of depressions at times. Those are the times when we feel that we just want t...
LATIKA TEOTIA
You read a book for the story, for each of its words," Gordy said, "and you draw your cartoons for t...
SHERMAN ALEXIE
You start out happy that you have no hips or boobs. All of a sudden you get them, and it feels slopp...
CINDY CRAWFORD
There are moments in every relationship that define when two people start to fall in love.
A fi...
COLLEEN HOOVER
Rules are rules... sometimes we should get out of them other times we get caugh for breaking the rul...
DEYTH BANGER

More Junot Díaz

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.
JUNOT DíAZ
You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote...
JUNOT DíAZ
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...
JUNOT DíAZ
There were a lot of these middle-aged single types in the neighborhood, shipwrecked by every kind of...
JUNOT DíAZ
But beautiful girl above all beautiful girls,' he wrote back, 'This is my home.
JUNOT DíAZ
Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they ...
JUNOT DíAZ
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s noth...
JUNOT DíAZ
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has ama...
JUNOT DíAZ
We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there ...
JUNOT DíAZ
Don't panic. Say, Hey, no problem. Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though th...
JUNOT DíAZ
It's never the changes we want that change everything.
JUNOT DíAZ
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun...
JUNOT DíAZ
Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in...
JUNOT DíAZ
Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywher...
JUNOT DíAZ
You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this...
JUNOT DíAZ
Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play w...
JUNOT DíAZ
Some of our hearts are more Gothic and take to haunting.
JUNOT DíAZ
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only wa...
JUNOT DíAZ
A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.
JUNOT DíAZ
For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and ...
JUNOT DíAZ
You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can. A smarty-pants, the...
JUNOT DíAZ
...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart ...
JUNOT DíAZ
They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of ...
JUNOT DíAZ
She never would admit it, but she felt utterly exposed at El Redentor, all those pale eyes gnawing a...
JUNOT DíAZ
Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is s...
JUNOT DíAZ
I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
JUNOT DíAZ
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.
JUNOT DíAZ
We all know that there are language forms that are considered impolite and out of order, no matter w...
JUNOT DíAZ
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a co...
JUNOT DíAZ
Don’t tell her that your moms knew right away what it was, that she recognized its smell from the ...
JUNOT DíAZ
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to b...
JUNOT DíAZ
Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.
JUNOT DíAZ
I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was...
JUNOT DíAZ
He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn't have said ...
JUNOT DíAZ
The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean ...
JUNOT DíAZ
Sure, I liked girls but I was always too terrified to speak to them unless we were arguing or I was ...
JUNOT DíAZ
Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the b...
JUNOT DíAZ
It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
JUNOT DíAZ
You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?

There are many ...
JUNOT DíAZ
You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, ...
JUNOT DíAZ
I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse,...
JUNOT DíAZ
Read more than you write, live more than you read
JUNOT DíAZ
What is clear is that being a reader/fanboy (for lack of a better term) helped him get through the r...
JUNOT DíAZ
His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of a chance he had for young love. Everybody else goin...
JUNOT DíAZ
She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
JUNOT DíAZ
It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing...
JUNOT DíAZ
Alma is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they've ...
JUNOT DíAZ
For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a ...
JUNOT DIAZ
I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and t...
JUNOT DIAZ
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss w...
JUNOT DIAZ
Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold...
JUNOT DIAZ
Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
JUNOT DIAZ
The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous popula...
JUNOT DIAZ
I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
JUNOT DIAZ
When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writin...
JUNOT DIAZ
John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his ex...
JUNOT DIAZ
We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out th...
JUNOT DIAZ
I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy...
JUNOT DIAZ
I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected f...
JUNOT DIAZ
I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that s...
JUNOT DIAZ
Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an ...
JUNOT DIAZ
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experi...
JUNOT DIAZ
Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell ...
JUNOT DIAZ
We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hards...
JUNOT DIAZ
It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.
JUNOT DIAZ
Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up ...
JUNOT DIAZ
Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just th...
JUNOT DIAZ
I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, ...
JUNOT DIAZ
Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and ...
JUNOT DIAZ
It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing...
JUNOT DIAZ
I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.
JUNOT DIAZ
I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to ...
JUNOT DIAZ
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against...
JUNOT DIAZ
I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was ...
JUNOT DIAZ
A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because...
JUNOT DIAZ
For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtl...
JUNOT DIAZ
So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-...
JUNOT DIAZ
In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fiction...
JUNOT DIAZ
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can creat...
JUNOT DIAZ
I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
JUNOT DIAZ
I'm a product of a fragmented world.
JUNOT DIAZ
God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.
JUNOT DIAZ
'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the glob...
JUNOT DIAZ
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes...
JUNOT DIAZ
When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that...
JUNOT DIAZ
Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
JUNOT DIAZ
I find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really sile...
JUNOT DIAZ
I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why...
JUNOT DIAZ
My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity,...
JUNOT DIAZ
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it...
JUNOT DIAZ
You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, w...
JUNOT DIAZ
All fruits do not ripen in one season.
LAURIE JUNOT
Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get ...
JUNOT DIAZ
I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to re...
JUNOT DIAZ
I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by ...
JUNOT DIAZ
My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in whi...
JUNOT DIAZ
I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committe...
JUNOT DIAZ
Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
JUNOT DIAZ
When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whate...
JUNOT DIAZ
I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twe...
JUNOT DIAZ
I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these ...
JUNOT DIAZ
We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where mal...
JUNOT DIAZ
I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.
JUNOT DIAZ
I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a ...
JUNOT DIAZ
Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd ...
JUNOT DIAZ
There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certa...
JUNOT DIAZ
Los hombres son dioses muertos.
CARLOS DíAZ DUFOO HIJO
Faith, I know nothing about it; I am my own ancestor. [Fr., An, ma foi, je n'en sais rien; moi je ...
ANDOCHE JUNOT (DUC D'ABRANTES)