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“It's never the changes we want that change everything.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best. ”
― Walt Whitman

“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Before all hope died I used to have this stupid dream that shit could be saved, that we would be in bed together like the old times, with the fan on, the smoke from our weed drifting above us, and I'd finally try to say the words that could have saved us.”
― Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles. But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth. I just nodded my head, said, See you around, Lola, and drove home.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“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 don't judge.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“America is woven of many strands. I would recognise them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Live with your head in the lion’s mouth.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“He was perceived to be intellectually promiscuous, a little too eager to please all groups.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“She was more sure of her politics than she was of herself.”
― David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,â€� Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“How much you truly “believeâ€� in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosisâ€�;”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

“That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be â€� when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.”
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman