I know a number of people who - from the comments they make - are going to vote for [Donald] Trump when that curtain closes. But let's keep it real honest here: They are voting for a xenophobic, anti-Latino white supremacist - don't try to pretty it up. This is now the age when people want to be white supremacists, but they don't actually want to be known for it.

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.

The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.

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.

The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.

You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don't, people will scorn you for it.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.