Junot Diaz Quotes

Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she's a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none.

You went up a girl and came down a woman.

Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.

Early youth is a baffling time.

Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen.

I'm not a diva. I'm a tadpole trying to be a frog.

In thirteen years, every aspect of the universe can change - ask a thirteen-year-old.

A home is a place in time. And no place stays the same after you finally grow up and leave it. No place can ever change as much as the person who grows up there.

Guys like me, we have a different style that makes it hard to break in easily. When I was 18, 19, I felt like I was just a boy, body-wise and mentality-wise. I had to fix everything together.

I'm not the same young man I was when I first got into music.

Young, dumb, lookin' in the mirror tryin' to figure out who I’m gonna be this year.

Midnight passes and I'm twenty-five days and a million years from becoming a man.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

By the time you are 30 you are still trying to make your 15-year-old self happy but you are a different person. You need to be brave and let go of that.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

It's easy for me to say that now, now I'm a father, I've got a four-and-a-half year old boy, I'm a different person. Well, I'm still the same person, but I'm different.

I'm still my parent's child, I'm still me, but I made a choice. I evolved into Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I think it has to do with evolution.

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

You can't be 16 forever.

I don't look the same as I did 20 years ago, nor should I.

I was the ugly duckling until I reached puberty.

I'm not changing to the point where suddenly I wear floor-length skirts and start playing the violin; I'm just growing up a little bit, I guess.

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.

I'm a woman now.