Quotes from Don Lee

It was one of those pointless arguments you enter without any strong formulations, but then, by dint of the opening parry, find yourself heatedly defending a position in which you don't really believe, yet from which you can no longer withdraw.

You need to be willing to live on the street to be an artist. Getting sucked into a career is an invitation to bail. It makes it too easy to give up. It makes it almost inevitable that you will.

Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl's explanation for how she got pregnant.

Conversation is not dialogue, it's monologues. No one ever really listens in conversations. It's civility that makes you wait and pretend you give a fuck what the other person is saying.

I'll never fall in love, because I could never trust that I wouldn't be abandoned.

At what point is it acceptable to give up?

If they haven't compromised themselves already, in their hearts they want to, because being true to one's art, keeping the dream alive, is utterly exhausting.

This was your fatal flaw–you always had a backup plan. You were never willing to risk everything.

There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.

We want to think that there's an inviolable continuity among old friends, a bond that cannot be fissured despite years of lassitude and neglect. We want to believe that there's truth and solace in our memories, that there's meaning and purpose to the things that have happened to us.

Youth is about promise.

What drove him to kill himself, she says, was realizing that he would never have what I now possess–a life beyond the pursuit of art–because being an artist, a writer, means isolating yourself in a room for hours, days on end, going into the darkest parts of yourself, and really, what sane person would want to do that?

How can you explain that it's just that he was sad, that he'd been sad all his life, and he knew he'd always be sad?

All this I am projecting, of course. I'll never know for sure. We can't fully understand what plagues each other's hearts, much less our own at times. Ultimately even our best friends are unknowable to us.

He was half-white and half-Korean, but when asked about his ethnicity, he always said Hawaiian, a declaration of racial neutrality that, more often than not, let him avoid further inquest.