Don Lee > Quotes

“Despite your best efforts and intentions, there's a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia. Eventually, you move on, latch on to another group of friends. Once in a while, though, you remember something, a remark or a gesture, and it takes you back. You think how close all of you were, the laughs and commiserations, the fondness and affection and support. You recall the parties, the trips, the dinners and late, late nights. Even the arguments and small betrayals have a revisionist charm in retrospect. You're astonished and enlivened by the memories. You wonder why and how it ever stopped. You have the urge to pick up the phone, fire off an email, suggesting reunion, resumption, and you start to act, but then don't, because it would be awkward talking after such a long lag, and, really, what would be the point? Your lives are different now. Whatever was there before is gone. And it saddens you, it makes you feel old and vanquished--not only over this group that disbanded, but also over all the others before and after it, the friends you had in grade and high school, in college, in your twenties and thirties, your kinship to them (never mind to all your old lovers) ephemeral and, quite possibly, illusory to begin with.”
― Don Lee, The Collective

“It’s not that people change. People don’t change. They merely hide things from you, and lie.”
― Don Lee

“You’re not going to be able to save her, you know. If you keep trying, she’ll break your heart.”
― Don Lee

“The simple exchange of legal tender for goods and services--was there anything more elemental, yet more beautiful? Money. No matter what anyone said, it was the answer to everything. When it came down to it, there was no human interaction that wasn't, at its core, a transaction.”
― Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin

“He didn't know why he was lying. Perhaps because his vanity was being engaged, and he wasn't above attending to his vanity.”
― Don Lee, Wrack and Ruin

“Perhaps what he feared most was happening–his imagination had abandoned him, the well had gone dry.”
― Don Lee

“We can’t sit around waiting for things to happen. We’ve got to make them happen. Nothing’s going to fall in our laps. That only happens to beautiful white people.”
― Don Lee

“Art’s not about being didactic. There’s nothing more boring or tedious than that. Art should simply be about what makes us human. Its only obligation, if anything, is to try to break the frozen sea within us.”
― Don Lee

“It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony?”
― Don Lee

“But you, you’d never hire a hooker, would you? Because you believe the concept of love is real and attainable and not merely a myth perpetrated by religious demagogues and prohibitionists and fascist conglomerates.”
― Don Lee

“Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl’s explanation for how she got pregnant.”
― Don Lee

“I knew it. You’re a romantic. God, I’m going to have to look after you, Eric, make a special project of you the next four years, because if you take that shit out into the world, that kind of fucking idealism, you’ll get slaughtered. You’ll get creamed. It’ll be the death of you.”
― Don Lee

“Conversation is not dialogue, it’s monologues. No one ever really listens in conversations. It’s civility that makes you wait and pretend you give a fuck what the other person is saying.”
― Don Lee

“All this I am projecting, of course. I’ll never know for sure. We can’t fully understand what plagues each other’s hearts, much less our own at times. Ultimately even our best friends are unknowable to us.”
― Don Lee

“You idealize me. You don’t even know me. If you really knew me, you wouldn’t like me very much.”
― Don Lee

“He was half-white and half-Korean, but when asked about his ethnicity, he always said Hawaiian, a declaration of racial neutrality that, more often than not, let him avoid further inquest.”
― Don Lee

“You do nothing, it becomes approval.”
― Don Lee

“Youth is about promise.”
― Don Lee

“I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.”
― Don Lee

“How can you explain that it’s just that he was sad, that he’d been sad all his life, and he knew he’d always be sad?”
― Don Lee

“There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.”
― Don Lee

“How well do we really know anyone? We only know what people are willing to reveal.”
― Don Lee

“It’s easy being outrageous. Much harder to offer real meaning.”
― Don Lee

“This was your fatal flaw–you always had a backup plan. You were never willing to risk everything.”
― Don Lee

“What drove him to kill himself, she says, was realizing that he would never have what I now possess–a life beyond the pursuit of art–because being an artist, a writer, means isolating yourself in a room for hours, days on end, going into the darkest parts of yourself, and really, what sane person would want to do that?”
― Don Lee

“And, of course, it might simply be that everyone’s become a little bored with one another, doing the same things over and over, hearing and telling the same stories.”
― Don Lee

“Despite your best efforts and intentions, there’s a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia.”
― Don Lee

“We’d insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed.”
― Don Lee

“We want to think that there’s an inviolable continuity among old friends, a bond that cannot be fissured despite years of lassitude and neglect. We want to believe that there’s truth and solace in our memories, that there’s meaning and purpose to the things that have happened to us.”
― Don Lee

“They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it’s depressing, whereas we’re fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain.”
― Don Lee