K-Ming Chang > Quotes

“My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“When the doctor asked if we have a history of heart disease, my mother said, “No we have no history, just stories, a long record of surviving our countries.”
― K-Ming Chang

“Once, I asked her what happened to a body when it died. She said it became a story, and death was just another translation of it.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Her laughter is a season you want to stand in forever, golden leaves relinking with the trees, springtime fizzing out of a bottle.”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“I related to the guillotine the most: I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“If I do nothing else with this life, carrying my mother’s blood is enough.”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“Another word for lesbian is: devourer of the dark.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House

“Some desires are only legible in the dark.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House

“The only man you should marry is the moon, she said, so you can divorce it every morning.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“I think I'll decompose in my own order, an order I'll decide. It will be my bones and teeth first, all my hardest parts, and then my organs, largest to smallest, and then my tongue and hair and eyeballs, and then my skin. I'm going to rot from the inside out. Not the outside in. When they dig me up, all that will be left is what I think, what I dream.”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“She belongs to me, yes, like a body belongs to its blood. I will spill from her and she will be better without me, lighter, so light she will return to the sky where she was born, an airplane, a skyfish, a rain of spades, digging to uproot me.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House

“It's the way she says Cathy that makes me listen, the way a woman pleads to any deity that has damned all her prayers, redirected them to death. A woman deboned of hope.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House

“You can’t trust the outside of anything”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“Don't tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn't.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Once an animal gets mean, Ama liked to say, there's no way to make it good again, You kill what can't be saved. All of her murders began as mercies”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how man snakes you have known personally.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Everything costs money, money, money, they tell us, except people. People are the only thing cheap. Every day, we cost so little to them. Should we pay for veins in our body to bring us our blood? Should we pay our bones to prop us up?”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she'd brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn't stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don' know. I won' t know them, but I'll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you'll be so sorry you'll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“The only man you should marry is the moon, [...], so you can divorce it every morning.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Except Ma doesn't measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields were she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in her Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Outside, the stars are loosening like the backs of earrings. I open my mouth to catch them, swallow.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House

“Forgiveness will show people you're boneless, and when you're boneless, people will think it's too easy to eat you.”
― K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats

“Cathy believed that the more she and Edie thirsted, the deeper their roots would snare inside each other. They would find inside each other's bodies all the water they wanted.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bone House