She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.

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

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

[Immigrating] didn't burn out my desire to travel, though that can happen. There's nothing like immigration to make you want to just stay put. But what I think of as home is this life between Santo Domingo and the parts of New Jersey and New York City that were my childhood, so in my mind it's like home is all those things combined.