Quotes from Don Lee

The simple exchange of legal tender for goods and services--was there anything more elemental, yet more beautiful? Money. No matter what anyone said, it was the answer to everything. When it came down to it, there was no human interaction that wasn't, at its core, a transaction.

It's not that people change. People don't change. They merely hide things from you, and lie.

He didn't know why he was lying. Perhaps because his vanity was being engaged, and he wasn't above attending to his vanity.

Perhaps what he feared most was happening–his imagination had abandoned him, the well had gone dry.

You're not going to be able to save her, you know. If you keep trying, she'll break your heart.

We can't sit around waiting for things to happen. We've got to make them happen. Nothing's going to fall in our laps. That only happens to beautiful white people.

From personal experience, Kenzo knew about the state of racial equality in America. It was sound in theory, but not in practice. It was a glorious dream, but just a dream. It would never work. It had never worked--not anywhere, not anytime in history--and the US was the only country foolish and hypocritical enough to try.

How well do we really know anyone? We only know what people are willing to reveal.

And, of course, it might simply be that everyone's become a little bored with one another, doing the same things over and over, hearing and telling the same stories.

It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony?

Despite your best efforts and intentions, there's a limited reservoir to fellowship before you begin to rely solely on the vapors of nostalgia.

I mean, what happened to developing the individual, to encouraging subversion and independence? I thought that's what this place was all about. Instead, it's, you know, just the old bourgeois concept of togetherness–i.e., conformity–under the guise of PC liberalism. It's fucking oppressive, man. It's downright totalitarian.

I knew it. You're a romantic. God, I'm going to have to look after you, Eric, make a special project of you the next four years, because if you take that shit out into the world, that kind of fucking idealism, you'll get slaughtered. You'll get creamed. It'll be the death of you.

I mean, nothing's really changed, but we've changed.

We'd insist that all truth was relative, that there was no reality without signifiers, that there was no there there, that nothing, in fact, really existed.

Sometimes the distinction between theft and homage is murky.

The hours, the dedication, the obsessiveness that must have been required to do this was breathtaking. Staggering. But you walked away not so much with admiration for the artist as concern for her mental health.

It's easy being outrageous. Much harder to offer real meaning.

You do nothing, it becomes approval.

I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.

But you, you'd never hire a hooker, would you? Because you believe the concept of love is real and attainable and not merely a myth perpetrated by religious demagogues and prohibitionists and fascist conglomerates.

They see an unremittingly sad film, and they think it's depressing, whereas we're fucking enthralled, because the catharsis for us is in witnessing great art, seeing the undiluted truth, in the shared recognition that life is pain.

There were no excuses. If you want to write, you write. You find the time. You make the time.

You idealize me. You don't even know me. If you really knew me, you wouldn't like me very much.