Angie Kim > Quotes

“In a way, he supposed, it was inevitable for immigrants to become child versions of themselves, stripped of their verbal fluency and, with it, a layer of their competence and maturity.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together -- one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad--every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness--resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“That was the thing about lies: they demanded commitment. Once you lied, you had to stick to your story.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“He’d learned early on—fights in a marriage were like seesaws. You needed to balance blame carefully. You pile too much blame on one person, let them thunk down to the ground, they’re liable to stand and walk away, send you flying down on your ass.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“It's a crazy world out there. Be curious. - Stephen Hawking”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“There are moments when something we’ve idealized all our lives changes and becomes something less.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy. How”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Our brains are hardwired to want resolution, to want the answer. The bigger and broader the mystery, the deeper the satisfaction when it’s resolved (a variation on Dad’s low baseline theory). They turn the pages and join the search party, to accelerate the process of solving the puzzle, of turning it into a different kind of story.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I believe there’s a fine line (if any) between optimism and willful idiocy, so I try to avoid optimism altogether, lest I fall over the line mistakenly.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“But that begs the questions of 1) what is it about women as victims that makes these stories so popular? and, more importantly, at least from the standpoint of perpetuating the image of adult men as strong and powerful, 2) what is it about men as victims that makes these stories seemingly implausible and rare?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“You don’t realize how much one depressed, stressed-out person in a house affects the whole family’s mood until it’s been lifted.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have—your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate in that alternate-you would be to get what you have.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Having a special-needs child didn’t just change you; it transmuted you, transported you to a parallel world with an altered gravitational axis.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“Americans were so proud of things being a few hundred years old, as if things being old were a value in and of itself. (Of course, this philosophy did not extend to people.)”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“An official codified declaration that this person you love is incompetent, not a full citizen, not a moral being capable of telling right from wrong. Like one of my little-kid logic chains gone wrong: you can’t speak or point; which means, therefore, you get a low score on an IQ test; which means, therefore, you’re less intelligent; which means, therefore, you’re less worthy; which means, therefore, you’re less human. In the eyes of everyone in that room, those words destroyed his humanity.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Because when you can’t talk, people assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you. It’s humiliating. Just thinking about it today, twenty years later, it really just…It’s still hard to talk about.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“For the rest of our lives, every time one of us goes somewhere and doesn’t return on time, doesn’t let the others know where we are, we will remember this time, what can happen. And we will fall apart.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“I lost a World - the other day! Has Anybody found? - Emily Dickinson, 1896”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“What bullshit nonsense, this whole blaming everything on moms. Is it any wonder that women are increasingly deciding not to have children, why the birth rate is declining drastically in both the US and Korea?”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“those fanatics who gun down abortion doctors in the name of saving lives.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“this breed of people who used manners to cover up unfriendliness the way people used perfume to cover up body odor”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“And yet, once we went inside, we had to carry on with the typical everyday stuff that seemed too insignificant to continue—think about dinner, drink water, use the bathroom, take out contact lenses. That’s the thing about biology; it doesn’t give a shit about outside emergencies.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“You don’t become obsessed with happiness, trying to maximize it and experimenting to calibrate it, unless it’s a mystery. If you’re already happy, if it comes easily to you, you don’t need to ponder it. It’s only if you can’t attain it that it consumes you.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“There’s a Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” about a book-lover desperate for more time so he can do nothing but read. He gets his wish; he’s the lone survivor of a global nuclear holocaust and ends up at a library with a lifetime’s worth of intact books. He’s excitedly sorting through them when his glasses fall off and shatter, leaving him unable to read.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls

“listen, can I pay you next week?” Pause. “I did get it, but my dad found out, he went totally berserko. I apparently”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“simultaneously heavier and lighter. Han. There was no English equivalent, no translation. It was an overwhelming sorrow and regret, a grief and yearning so deep it pervades your soul—but with a sprinkling of resilience, of hope.”
― Angie Kim, Miracle Creek

“please don’t make assumptions before you know, based on the incorrect “nonverbal” label, based on how someone looks and acts.”
― Angie Kim, Happiness Falls