“And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“The half-life of love is forever.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“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 matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“...sometimes a start is all we ever get.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You drive her to work. You quote Neruda. You compose a mass e-mail disowning all your sucias. You block their e-mails. You change your phone number. You stop drinking. You stop smoking. You claim you’re a sex addict and start attending meetings. You blame your father. You blame your mother. You blame the patriarchy. You blame Santo Domingo. You find a therapist. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. You start taking salsa classes like you always swore you would so that the two of you could dance together. You claim that you were sick, you claim that you were weak—It was the book! It was the pressure!—and every hour like clockwork you say that you’re so so sorry. You try it all, but one day she will simply sit up in bed and say, No more, and, Ya, and you will have to move from the Harlem apartment that you two have shared. You consider not going. You consider a squat protest. In fact, you say won’t go. But in the end you do.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“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, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“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.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“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, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“You eventually erase her contact info from your phone but not the pictures you took of her in bed while she was naked and asleep, never those.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“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 you every day.
At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
“In another universe I probably came out OK, ended up with mad novias and jobs and a sea of love in which to swim, but in this world I had a brother who was dying of cancer and a long dark patch of life like a mile of black ice waiting for me up ahead.”
― Junot Díaz, quote from This Is How You Lose Her
Junot Díaz
Born place: in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Born date December 31, 1968
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“One of the risks of being quiet is that the other people can fill your silence with their own interpretation: You’re bored. You’re depressed. You’re shy. You’re stuck up. You’re judgmental. When others can’t read us, they write their own story—not always one we choose or that’s true to who we are.”
― Sophia Dembling, quote from The Introvert's Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World
“The guaranteed cure for heartbreak: find pain that’s much, much worse.”
― Will McIntosh, quote from Love Minus Eighty
“You have taught me that I am allowed to like myself as I am, at whatever stage I am in. I can change, I can stay the same, or I can be whoever it is that is right for me; but I can be satisfied. No, more than that. I can be proud. I can celebrate. That is what I am going to do.”
― Jessica Park, quote from Flat-Out Celeste
“Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from Awakenings
“Wishing is the beginning of imagination. They practice wishing when they are young things, and then -when they have grown - they have a developed imagination. Which can do some harm - greed, that kind of thing - but more often does them some good. They can imagine that things might be different. Might be other than they seem. Could be better.”
― Gregory Maguire, quote from What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy
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Red-Headed StepchildBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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