Gish Jen > Quotes

“A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.”
― Gish Jen, Typical American

“He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits: freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America.”
― Gish Jen

“Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.”
― Gish Jen, Typical American

“He was like a nation in crisis, looking back, and back and back — its history might be ugly, but its past shone perfect.”
― Gish Jen, Typical American

“Plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking. Even his name is plain boiled: John. Maybe because I grew up with black bean sauce and hoisin sauce and garlic sauce, I always feel something is missing when my son-in-law talk.”
― Gish Jen, Who's Irish?

“I allowed silence its eloquence.”
― Gish Jen

“We consume to avoid living.”
― Gish Jen

“If you ask her, I’ll kill you,” says Callie pleasantly. And so it is that when Naomi and Mona are introduced—really, reintroduced—Mona prepares to ask her immediately.”
― Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land

“Of course he bothers me. He's my husband.”
― Gish Jen, Typical American

“One left; things shifted in one's absence; one returned to something else. Time frustrated all. There was no sneaking past its rough guard, even to get to one's own yard of intimacies.”
― Gish Jen, Typical American

“In Hong Kong, there was no People of Color club because they were all the same color, and if you said bad things about white people, it wasn’t racism, it was resistance, unless you said it to their face. Then it was speaking truth to power.”
― Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon

“Try to distinguish ignorance from malice. And keep your animus for malice.”
― Gish Jen, The Resisters

“If, as my mother used to say, a secret is a shame or a treasure, these were treasures.”
― Gish Jen, The Resisters

“In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up with an asymmetrical mouthful of pastry, which he then had to relocate with his tongue to a more central location. This made him look less purposive than he might. Also, croissants were more apt than other breakfast foods to spray little flakes all over one’s clean dark suit. Art himself had accordingly never ordered a croissant in any working situation, and he believed that attention to this sort of detail was how it was that he had not lost his job like so many of his colleagues.”
― Gish Jen, Who's Irish?

“What did Duncan have with which to organize pointless, brutal life?”
― Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon

“To have no particular aim was to open grand possibilities...”
― Gish Jen, Who's Irish?

“read Michael Kohlhaas, as well as The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, and Bleak House and The Trial and To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Fire Next Time.”
― Gish Jen, The Resisters

“He would not want to sound like a haunted man; he would not want to sound as though he was calling from a welfare hotel, years too late, to say Yes, that was a baby we had together, it would have been a baby. For he could not help now but recall the doctor explaining about that child, a boy, who had appeared so mysteriously perfect in the ultrasound. Transparent, he had looked, and gelatinous, all soft head and quick heart; but he would have, in being born, broken every bone in his body.”
― Gish Jen, Who's Irish?

“...even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond Upgrades-- something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.”
― Gish Jen, The Resisters

“Also, now that we were just one league among many, we had needed a league name. And so we had become, despite Eleanor’s objections, Aunt Nellie’s All-Star Resistance League—the Resisters, for short.”
― Gish Jen, The Resisters

“What's more, he was going to have a full American breakfast with bacon and eggs, none of this continental bullshit.”
― Gish Jen, Who's Irish?