C Pam Zhang > Quotes

“And wasn’t that the real reason for traveling, a reason bigger than poorness and desperation and greed and fury—didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“I don't see how you can claim to own a place and treat it so poor, there are methods of getting what you want without tearing at the land like a pack of wild dogs.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“You should always ask why a person is telling you their story.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“What real riches are? I could spend this gold tomorrow and it would belong to someone else. No. I want us rich in choices, that's something noone can take.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“She thinks of the other direction. The hills where she was born, and the sun that bleaches sky and brightens grass. She thinks about when she stood in a dead lake and held what men desired and died for. She thinks that was nothing, really, compared to the way the noonday sun makes the grass blaze. Horizon to horizon a shimmer. Who could truly grasp it, the huge and maddening glint, the ever-shifting mirage, the grass that refused to be owned or pinned but changed with every angle of light: what that land was, and to whom, death or life, good or bad, lucky or unlucky, countless lives birthed and destroyed by its terror and generosity.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“That feeling of knowing someone will call your name—that’s the feeling I got when your ma met my eyes. I knew I was almost home.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“You believe in a country that does not exist as you imagine it, in a code of morality as fanciful as any creation myth. What do you call that if not blind faith?”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I can see now that I was hungry for love that summer. For something to love: a bite, a dream, a person, a meal, a field, a piece of a world worth believing in.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Real food is whatever cooks are proud to make.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it. Or writes it.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Imagine Persephone for the first time in the absolute intoxication of dark, her senses stretching languid, the cave as moist as lover's breath. The feast, the chair, the plate, the fruit: red. Imagine a story whose moral is mute desire.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“We shouldn’t be forced to choose at all. The fury in Aida’s voice was familiar. Nostalgic. I’d once possessed that strain of fury, as had my fellow cooks, my friends, my produce guy, a virulent rage against our tainted inheritance of this stupid, smog-choked planet. But it couldn’t last. We’d been inoculated from rage by other, more immediate concerns. For example: how to pay rent, how to stay alive. Aida, rich as she was, hadn’t been forced to choose between anger and dinner. For the first time in years, I tasted, through her, that feeling.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Religion is a flimsy construction of rituals infused with arbitrary power. The gestures have always been empty; behind them stand hustlers no different from you. All that is required is a convincing performance.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy feeling a sorrow kin to love. Because though these dry yellow hills yielded nothing but pain and sweat and misplaced hope—she knows them. A part of her is buried in them, a part of her lost in them, a part of her found and born in them—so many parts belong to this land. An ache in her chest like the tug of a dowsing rod. Across the ocean the people will look like them, but they won’t know the shapes of these hills, or the soughing of grass, or the taste of muddy water—all these things that shape Lucy within as her eyes and nose shape her without. Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy mourning, already, the loss of this land.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“What, I ask, is fairness in a world that fears there is never enough, in which one need always scrapes against another? I'm not smart enough to give that answer. I only believe that the tongue, dumb beast, is not selfish in its instinctive cant toward pleasure. The question that follows me through the seasons of my life is what comes after hunger is sated; whether that pleasure is guarded, or shared.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I want, I said, to be a tree. She thought it was the drugs speaking. I was asleep before I could share the secret I once learned of a pomegranate orchard's prodigious growth: Old trees, dying, may burst after fruitless years into sudden blossom, a final exuberance of flower and sugar. Toward sun. At the last, even trees ache in their sap for pleasure.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“There is time on this greener earth for girls to ripen into themselves; what they'll do with that is beyond anyone's knowing, seeing as they are not limited to anger versus dinner, seriousness versus sentiment, survival versus all life's rampancy. They can choose.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“It’s just as hard to miss disaster as it is to bear witness. If you don’t see—you keep imagining.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Stand long enough under open sky in these parts, and a curious thing happens. At first the clouds meander, aimless. Then they start to turn, swirling toward you at their center. Stand long enough and it isn’t the hills that shrink—it’s you that grows. Like you could step over and reach the distant blue mountains, if you so chose. Like you were a giant and all this your land.”
― C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Anyone who has fed the rich knows that, past a certain price, it is not a matter of taste, nor hunger.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“Burial is just another recipe”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tiger, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba's tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past? Letting it drag behind them. Letting it make them into fools.

And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba's tales as tall ones - because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Close to the stem, he said, closest to the earth, their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters. Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“And so the milk ran dry. But first we had the luck of those creams, those spilled-down sauces, that summer of appetite that began with a soufflé cheesecake. There are very few ingredients to the recipe. Butter doesn't make the cake, nor cream. Its secret is ephemerality. Pull it from the oven and it is perfect; the next moment it is cooling, flattening, collapsing beneath the gravity of time. This is a flavor untasted by diners and critics, no record of its existence but for a private memory that lingers on one or two tongues.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey

“I refused to be stuck. In Pasaje, California. In the smallness of my mother's life. In a fixed notion of my cooking, my abilities, my worth as ascribed to my Chineseness my Asianness my smallness my womanness my perpetual foreignness--myself.”
― C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey