Junot Diaz Quotes

Nobody else will ever be able to save me if I’m not fighting as hard as I can to save myself.

nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.

None but ourselves can free our minds.

I don't have a weapon in my hand, and I don't have a uniform on my body, but my uniform now is my scars and weapon is my words, so I'm still serving.

I want a character to wake up one day and feel like, 'I can face it'. That, to me, is happy. I want the characters to rescue themselves, though you use the relationships you have, to make you strong enough to be able to do that.

Both 'Saturday Church' and 'Pose' are incredible because they demonstrate something essential about survival. When you get pushed hard enough by certain circumstances, your survival mechanism kicks in, and you grow into the things that you need or are missing in your life.

You save yourself or you remain unsaved.

in freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.

I had to fight hard for everything. I wanted to get out. I want to take my destiny into my own hands and escape the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence. This struggle has shaped who I am to this day.

She was afraid, but she couldn't just sit around waiting for someone to save her. She had to try to save herself, try to figure it out.

The best revenge is to always survive yourself.

A girl expecting rescue never learns to save herself. Even with the means, she will find her courage wanting.

nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself

Independence was a big, big thing for me. I saw my voice as a way out - when my parents fought, I'd run up to my room, put on The Sound of Music, open the window and sing out. My voice was my escape.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to wake up one more time. It is harder to stay where you are than to get out.

When you're in a dark place, and your light is going to run out before too long, you get on with things. It's a wonder to me how few people apply that same logic to their lives.

The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.

They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.

Strength is the outcome of need.

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.

I think part of a hero construct is overcoming loss, or being abandoned, or having to make your own way in the world.

You can get what you want. Never sell out. Don't break. Don't weaken. Don't let the kindness of strangers be your salvation, for it is no salvation at all. Unless you sleep alone, you sleep with the enemy. Never come out of the storm. On the other hand, maybe you should. You don't have what it takes to go the hard way. Come out of the cold and sit by the fire. Let them warm you with the smiles and promise of friendship's fortune. Lose your edge. A soft body and chained mind suit you. Chances are you don't have what it takes to walk the frozen trail. Stay home and relax.