Quotes from Gish Jen

Whatever I do in life, I'm almost always aware that there's another way to do it.

Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

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.

He was like a nation in crisis, looking back, and back and back — its history might be ugly, but its past shone perfect.

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.

Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.

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.

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.

I allowed silence its eloquence.

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.

Of course he bothers me. He's my husband.

If, as my mother used to say, a secret is a shame or a treasure, these were treasures.

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.

What's more, he was going to have a full American breakfast with bacon and eggs, none of this continental bullshit.

Try to distinguish ignorance from malice. And keep your animus for malice.

We consume to avoid living.

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.

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.

What did Duncan have with which to organize pointless, brutal life?

To have no particular aim was to open grand possibilities...

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

Many women tend toward the interdependent end of things, we tend to see ourselves in relationship to others to a far greater degree than men.

These are ideas that work for many, and that may well reflect your true understanding of life.