Junot Diaz Quotes

I've been through so much in my life. I've seen so much. I know how fast things can change. I know someone can be here one minute and gone the next.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

Yes, you can lose somebody overnight, yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.

This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.

The worldly stuff is not always going to be there and it could be taken away at any moment.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Here life itself, life at its best and healthiest, awaits the caprice of the bullet. Let us see the development of the day. All else may stand over, perhaps for ever. Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.

You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

The essence of what makes life beautiful is the fact that it can go away.

Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up if you still want to see things.

I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.

All human joys are swift of wing, For heaven doth so allot it; That when you get an easy thing, You find you haven't got it

Isn't it strange how we move out lives for another day? Like skipping a beat, what if a great wave should wash us all away?

Surely mortal man is a broomstick!

Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

No one could say how long that life would last. Whatever has form can disappear in an instant.

We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.

You have to hurry up if you want to see something, everything disappears.

The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.

I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between you teeth.

All human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood.