Author: Junot Diaz

Cites

• Sandra Cisneros (1)
  • IN: This is How You Lose Her (2012) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Okay, we didn't work and all memories to tell you the truth aren't good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I love your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours.
    FROM: "One Last Poem for Richard", (1987), Poem, Mexico/US
• Gustavo Pérez Firmat (2)
  • IN: Drown (1996) Fiction, Anthology Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.
    FROM: Bilingual Blues, (1995), Book, Cuba
• Stan & Kirby, Jack Lee (1)
  • IN: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus??
    FROM: Fantastic Four, (1966), Comic, US
• Derek Walcott (1)
  • IN: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings, But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, nigger, Surian, and French Creole, so I leave if for them and their carnival -- I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
    FROM: The Schooner Flight, (1979), Poem, Saint Lucia