Oscar Wao Quotes

But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

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.

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.

Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

- Nothing else has any efficacy, I might as well be myself. - But your yourself sucks! - It is, lamentably, all I have.

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.

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.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.

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.

It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

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.

Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.

Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.

It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.

Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.

I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

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.

...a particularly Jersey malaise--the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres.

The only way out is in.

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.

Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn't we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?

If you ask me I don't think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That's enough.

When you're sixteen a body like this is free; when you're forty it's a full-time occupation.

I mean, shit, what Latino family doesn't think it's cursed?

Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.

Happiness, when it comes, is stronger than all the jerk girls in Santo Domingo combined.

Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.

Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is going insane, and I had to bolt upstairs and put him in a headlock.

It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person's character.

Shot at twenty-seven times - what a Dominican number...

No one, alas, more oppressive than the oppressed.

You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin.

Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.

A romantic she was, but not a pendeja.

...what a surprise (we all know how tolerant the tolerant are)-...

Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.

What else she doesn't know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided, couldn't figure his way out of it. Fukú.

They were all on the volleyball team together and tall and fit as colts and when they went for runs it was what the track team might have looked like in terrorist heaven.

I seem to be allergic to diligence, and Lola said, Ha. What you're allergic to is trying.

He had secret loves all over town, the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn't have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming.

He's really jealous, Ybon said rather weakly. Just have him meet me, Oscar said. I make all boyfriends feel better about themselves.

His adolescent nerdliness vaporizing any iota of a chance he had for young love. Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, beind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. 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.

It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these “superstitions.” In fact, it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you.

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. You don't know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around.

Al fin y al cabo, al éxito le encanta tener testigos, pero el fracaso no puede existir sin ellos

...and in the gloaming of her dwindling strength there yawned a loneliness so total it was beyond death, a loneliness that obliterated all memory, the loneliness of a childhood where she’d not even had her own name

The capitan...one of those tall, arrogant, acerbically handsome niggers that most of the planet feels inferior to. Also one of those very bad men that not even postmodernism can explain away.

They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú - generally a curse or doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since.

I watched commercial ave. slide past and there in the distance were the lights of route 18. that was one of those moments that would always be Rutgers for me.

The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.

Love. Oscar knew he should have checked out right then. He liked to kid himself that it was only cold anthropological interest that kept him around to see how it would all end, but the truth was he couldn't extricate himself. He was totally and irrevocably in love with Ana. What he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared to the amor he was carrying in his heart for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The only thing that came close to how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and everything he hoped to write came even close.

She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.

To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve--

Lola swore she would never return to that terrible country. On one of our last nights as novios she said, Ten million Trujillos is all we are.

The next day at breakfast he asked his mother: Am I ugly? She sighed. Well, hijo, you certainly don’t take after me. Dominican parents! You got to love them!

She watched hungrily for visitors from out of town, threw open her arms at the slightest hint of a wind and at night she struggled Jacob-like against the ocean pressing down on her.

La Inca shook her head. She was looking at her favorite picture of his mother on her first day at private school, one of those typical serious DR shots. What always happens. Un maldito hombre.

They walked him into the cane and then turned him around. He tried to stand bravely... They looked at Oscar and he looked at them and then he started to speak. The words coming out like they belonged to someone else, his Spanish good for once. He told them that what they were doing was wrong, that they were going to take a great love out of the world. Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him. He told them about Ybón and the way he loved her and how much they had risked and that they'd started to dream the same dreams and say the same words. He told them that it was only because of her love that he'd been able to do the thing that he had done, the thing they could no longer stop, told them if they killed him they would probably feel nothing and their children would probably feel nothing either, not until they were old and weak or about to be struck by a car and then they would sense him waiting for them on the other side and over there he wouldn't b no fatboy or dork or kid no girl had ever loved; over there he'd be a hero, an avenger. Because anything you can dream (he put his hand up) you can be. They waited respectfully for him to finish and then they said, their faces slowly disappearing in the gloom, Listen, we'll let you go if you tell us what "fuego" means in English. Fire, he blurted out, unable to help himself. Oscar—

Like they say: los que menos corren, vuelan.

But no matter what the truth, remember: Dominicans are Caribbean and therefore have an extraordinary tolerance for extreme phenomena

...you can't regret the life you didn't lead.

I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free.

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

Everybody else going through the terror and joy of their first crushes, their first dates, their first kisses while Oscar sat in the back of the class, behind his DM's screen, and watched his adolescence stream by. 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.

In my universe, when a dork like Oscar pushes up on a girl like Jenni, he usually gets bounced faster than your tía Daisy's rent checks, but Jenni must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerdboys, because by the end of February she was actually treating him all civil and shit.

Yes, the wildness was in me, yes it kept my heart beating fast all the long day, yes it danced around me while I walked down the street, yes it let me look boys straight in the face when they stared at me, yes it turned my laugh from a cough into a long wild fever, but I was still scared. How could I not be? I was my mother's daughter. Her hold on me stronger than love.

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.

She was one of those golden mulatas that French-speaking Caribbeans call chabines, that my boys call chicas de oro; she had snarled, apocalyptic hair, copper eyes, and was one whiteskinned relative away from jaba.

That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.

Stared at the toothpick-thin blackgirl who worked at the Friendly's, whom he was in love with but with whom he would never speak.

The pejorative parigüayo, Watchers agree, is a corruption of the English neologism "party watcher." The word came into common usage during the First American Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916-1924. (You didn't know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.)

This is how you treat your mother?" she cried. And if I could of I would have broken the entire length of my life across her face, but instead I screamed back, "And this is how you treat your daughter?

Never had the opportunity in her first lost childhood; and in the intervening years her desire for it had doubled over and doubled over like a katana being forged until finally it was sharper than the truth.

They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú Americanus, or more colloquially, fukú-generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World.

I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: ‘A Stronger Loving World'. To the only panel he's circled. Oscar-who never defaced a book in his life-circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt's plan has succeeded in ‘saving the world'. Veidt says: ‘I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end'. And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: ‘In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends'.

If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

Ramfis fled the country after Trujillo's death, lived dissolutely off his father's swag, and ended up dying in a car crash of his own devising in 1969; the other car he hit contained the Duchess of Albuquerque, Teresa Beltrán de Lis, who died instantly; Lil'Fuckface went on murdering right to the end.

The guards then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that Abelard was a homosexual and a Communist — That is untrue! Abelard protested — but who is going to listen to a gay comunista?

The word came into common usage during the First American Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916 to 1924. (You didn't know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don't worry, when you have kids they won't know the U.S. occupied Iraq either.) During the First Occupation it was reported that members of the American Occupying Forces would often attend Dominican parties but instead of joining in the fun the Outlanders would simply stand at the edge of dances and watch. Which of course must have seemed like the craziest thing in the world. Who goes to a party to watch?

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

Their flashlight newly activated, they walked him into the cane--never had he heard anything so loud and alien, the susurration, the crackling, the flashes of motion underfoot (snake? mongoose?), overhead even the stars, all of them gathered in vainglorious congress.

He read The Lord of the Rings for what I’m estimating the millionth time, one of his greatest loves and greatest comforts since he’d first discovered it, back when he was nine and lost and lonely and his favorite librarian had said, Here, try this, and with one suggestion changed his life. Got through almost the whole trilogy, but then the line “and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls” and he had to stop, his head and heart hurting too much.

Casa Hatüey was named Hatüey because in Times Past it supposedly had been owned by a descendant of the priest who tried to baptize Hatüey right before the Spaniards burned him at the stake. (What Hatüey said on that pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I'd rather go to Hell.) History, however, has not been kind to Hatüey. Unless somethings changes ASAP he will go out like his camarada Crazy Horse. Coffled to a beer, in a country not his own.

But take heart: For every phalanx of nerds who die there are always a few who succeed. Not long after that horrific murder, a whole pack of revolutionary nerds ran aground on a sandbar on the southeast coast of Cuba. Yes, it was Fidel and Revolutionary Crew, back for a rematch against Batista. Of the eight-two revolutionaries who splashed ashore, only twenty-two survived to celebrate the New Year, including one book-loving argentino. A bloodbath, with Batista's forces executing even those who surrendered. But these twenty-two, it would prove, were enough.

And yet there are other days, when I’m downtrodden or morose, when I find myself at my desk late at night, unable to sleep, flipping through (of all things) Oscar’s dog-eared copy of Watchmen. One of the few things that he took with him on the Final Voyage that we recovered. The original trade. I flip through the book, one of his top three, without question, to the last horrifying chapter: “A Stronger Loving World.” To the only panel he’s circled. Oscar—who never defaced a book in his life—circled one panel three times in the same emphatic pen he used to write his last letters home. The panel where Adrian Veidt and Dr. Manhattan are having their last convo. After the mutant brain has destroyed New York City; after Dr. Manhattan has murdered Rorschach; after Veidt’s plan has succeded in “saving the world.” Veidt says: “I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.” And Manhattan, before fading from our Universe, replies: “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

He wrote that Ybón had little hairs coming up to her almost her bellybutton and that she crossed her eyes when he entered her but what really got him was not the bam-bam-bam of sex – it was the little intimacies that he'd never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair or getting her underwear off a line or watching her walk naked to the bathroom or the way she would suddenly sit on his lap and put her face into his neck. The intimacies like listening to her tell him about being a little girl and him telling her that he'd been a virgin all his life. He wrote that he couldn't believe he'd had to wait for this so goddamn long. (Ybón was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.) He wrote: So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]