When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.
Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
If you were a nerd computer geek in 1982, the amount of isolation you felt – at least what I experienced, or the kids I knew, the isolation they felt – was almost total. They were not part of society; no one thought they were cool.
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.
Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it’s worth.
Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain’t no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.
You’re the only person I’ve ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking.
I guess it’s true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.
We’re accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I’m sure that’s not any different for anyone else.
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.
You’re Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you’ll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don’t, people will scorn you for it.
It’s just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it’s over, it’s over. You never get over it.
That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
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.
Art is not boosterism, it’s not propaganda, and it’s not spin, but that’s not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.
Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they’re definitely not told to see 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 it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
Anger has a way of returning.