Chang-rae Lee > Quotes

“It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“...whether the people are happy or not in their lives, they have learned to keep steadily moving, moving all the time.”
― Chang Rae Lee, Gesture Life

“For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“You can be affected by a person because of something particular they said or did but sometimes how a person was, a manner of being, that gets most deeply absorbed, and prompts you to revisit certain parts of your life with an enhanced perspective, flowing forward right up to now.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“I'm a B+ student of life.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“And while it's easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn't this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there is finally no telling exactly where it begins, where it ends, or where it places you now.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can't hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but by what worried him.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Aloft

“What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“What if loving something means you should mostly feel frustrated and thwarted? And then a little ruined, too, by the pursuit? But you keep coming back for more?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“We feel ever obliged by everday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn't: a mutual spectacle of imagination.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“But let's suppose another way of considering her, which was that she had a special conviction of imagination. Few of us do, to be honest. We wish and wish and often with fury but never very deeply. For if we did, we'd see how the world can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That it and we are, in fact, unbounded. Free.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“And though the implication is that I am the sort who is always careful and preparing, I that that's not right, either' in fact I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in a lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking-out, automatic and involuntary. [pp. 320-321]”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life

“Behold a fire from the opposite shore.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“I would give most anything to hear my father's talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“That Fan did not see any of this is not so ironic, for all along her journey we’ve observed more of her than she’ll ever know. She moves on, she pushes forward, this her guileless calling, and we have to remind ourselves that it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“The truth, finally, is who can tell it. ”
― Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Moment to moment, we act freely, we make decisions and form opinions and there is very little to throttle us. We think each of us has a map marked with private routings and preferred habitual destinations, and go by a legend of our own. Yet it turns out you can overlay them and see a most amazing correspondence; what you believed were very personal contours aligning not exactly but enough that while our via points may diverge, our endings do not.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea