Quotes from Lan Samantha Chang

We want to travel back in time, but we can't, and so we want to go to a new place instead. Place is what we have instead of time. No. Not true. Money is what we have now, instead of place or time." He exhales. "Time is money. Place is money. Love, love is money. And power is money. You'll see.

The sincere reaction to making meaningful art is often speechlessness. We make art about what we cannot understand through any other method. The finished product is like a pearl, complete and beautiful, but mute about itself. The writer has given us this piece of his interior and there is frequently no explanation, nothing to be said about it. Often, the writer himself has very little idea of what he has created.

Because America is not a democracy, it's not a place of opportunity, he knows, if you can't choose to be white.

Because self-hatred is as galvanizing as ambition.

Because he isn't cherished, he's allowed to aim beyond his parents' petty goals. He can leave all of them behind.

If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young.

Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.

The people who matter the most to us in the end, who teach us the most, are the people who make their worst mistakes with us.

If I could change a single thing about my life,' she said gently, 'I would not have been so unhappy when I was young.

It's because of the way you are. It's why you're happy reading novels. You're only comfortable with a piece of the world that you can hold in your hand.

Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?

She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption.

What do you mean by yuanfen?" She thought for a minute and replied, "It means: that apportionment of love which is destined for you in this world.

The inner Min starved; she woke in the middle of the night, then lay for hours wondering what was wrong.

For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of our world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade.

For it is through humility, he knew, that holiness--and poetry--find entrance to the human soul.

Anyway, I gave her the ring. We were serious at the time. Words were spoken, promises made, unborn children were imagined and named! We were twenty-two years old. We get engaged, everything is fine, and then—well, a decade goes by.

This story is blowing up because of the racism of the white American community. Look to your own families, people, and don't throw stones.

After emotions are felt, expressed, where do they go? Is there a place where spent passion collects? Surely it can't simply vaporize, disappear like smoke. There must be a secret hiding place. For every old love affair, a locked room.

It's true on a technicality. I'm being held unlawfully. I didn't commit the crime for which I've been convicted. But if you look at it another way, I deserve to be here. I did a lot of other shitty things, for which I wasn't punished.

You were rational. I used to think you the most reasonable of the brothers. You were rational until you had a glimpse of the truth—very simple, but distorting your assumptions, blowing them up from the inside.

The blood of the thief, the pioneer and the marauder, the yearner and the usurper. She looks out at the desert and its dream of tranquility.

Who would one rather be? The one who desires, or the object of desire? One's answer to this question might determine if he is meant to be a poet or something else entirely.

We all hated him. We were all his bitches. Our motives lie in the past. It's a dark room with the flayed corpses of animals in it. Nobody in their right mind wants to go there.