Junot Diaz Quotes

I can't go back and label myself as an outcast because I was a pretty well-adjusted kid, but I can certainly relate to the feeling of being an outsider.

I never felt comfortable with myself, because I was never part of the majority. I always felt awkward and shy and on the outside of the momentum of my friends' lives.

I was always the biggest nerd in school: I had very few friends; I was always picked on; I used to wear really big glasses. I was the epitome of a nerd.

Everyone is against me - except the people!

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I was not a cool kid. There was no reason for me to be marginalised. I was just a nerd. I was kind of weird, and I found solace in video games.

You go through your life feeling like an outsider, and you respond to society in a different way when you feel like an outsider.

I tried so many times to fit in but I could never ever fit in. I was always like, an outcast.

I'm definitely gonna be an outcast.

I was ostracized by my community.

The way I felt growing up, which was like an outcast - I was weird, I was a nerd, I read fantasy books - I think a lot of fantasy book readers and a lot of readers and writers in general have that experience of isolation.

One day you're racing about the business of life, harried but vital, a part of its machinery. Then gradually but inexorably you are left out, until one day you find the machinery tearing along without you - and nobody even notices.

Everyone in life knows what it's like to be picked on and to feel like an outsider.

When I was a kid--10, 11, 12, 13--the thing I wanted most in the world was a best friend. I wanted to be important to people; to have people that understood me. I wanted to just be close to somebody. And back then, a thought would go through my head almost constantly: "There's never gonna be a room someplace where there's a group of people sitting around, having fun, hanging out, where one of them goes, 'You know what would be great? We should call Fiona. Yeah, that would be good.' That'll never happen. There's nothing interesting about me." I just felt like I was a sad little boring thing.

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

I really was alone, and the only thing worse than being alone was having everyone else see how lonely you were

I have come to realize more and more that the greatest disease and the greatest suffering is to be unwanted, unloved, uncared for, to be shunned by everybody, to be just nobody.

Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

When I was growing up, I was as socially outcast as any nerd could possibly be. I was in the chess club, I brought D&D stuff to school, I had every game system you could imagine, I spent countless hours at arcades, computer camp, loud presence in the Latin Club. All that stuff.

I don't have many friends so the phone doesn't ring and no one's asking me to go out and go dancing with them.

When I was a kid, I used to be way more nerdy about comic books and comic book characters. I still love them, but I don't collect anymore.

The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me. Somehow, that really bugs me.

If someone were plucked from the group and given those responsibilities, they might find themselves growing more aloof, just by virtue of that promotion. Suddenly the group culture excludes you. I saw this in my own working life, and I don't think it's a coincidence - I sensed a kind of loneliness in middle managers especially.

I spent a long time in the shadows. I always had this feeling that I was the only one going through stuff, because I kept it a secret. Once I decided to use my voice in a way that could potentially help others, I found there were a lot of people like me - a lot of kids left behind. So, I wanted to call attention to the issue.