Quotes from Chang-Rae Lee

Most of us can't accept that the gig is ours, so we lurk around, we tug and scratch at ourselves as if in borrowed skins, and never fully belong to the moments that can steadily add up to nothing a lot quicker than you think.

so we texted about getting some "quality time" in then. We were long practiced at assuring this, which worked for us. But we all know the truth: real "quality time" happens without you knowing it's happening

It struck her how a man could seem to gain a little bit of magic or grace or virtue with every woman he was with, but that a woman--though she said maybe should should be fair and just speak for herself--relinquished something each time, even if it ended mutually and well.

You don't tempt fate, you ignore it completely.

Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write it on the sticker, and then have m press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.

And as terrified as she might have been as she lay in that room, perhaps regretting herself to the core, she had already resolved not to show any fear, no matter what was in store for her. So when

He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed but by what worried him.

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know, and as wild as our dreams might be, we can't help but read them with the same grounded circumspection that guided our forebears when they mapped out our walls.

Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in a simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man.

THE JOURNEY WAS NEARLY OVER. The

It turns out that we are one, if not ever how we expected. And it cannot matter that outwardly nothing has changed yet. Maybe we don't even expect it to...We may not soon be heeded, but at least we can feel the long-held rumbles, now open-throated, our lungs warmed and aching with this special use that we know may be poignant only to us. There was so little of this voicing before, and now that there is much more, we see it takes as many forms as there are people, though some don't easily align.

theory is an extremely complicated thing, as varied and mixed-up and contradictory as life itself.

All around B-Mor it's much the same, which is happy enough. But maybe it's the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both? And whether or not there is anything to be done about it, you begin to learn what you value most.

Reg was never going to ace the Exams, not in a millennium. In fact, he didn't even bother to take them. He was the sort of kindly, dreamy boy who is prevailed upon by whim and instinct, and if he sometimes found trouble, it was always the charming kind, such as when a dog gets his muzzle stuck in a jar of peanut butter.

My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own. This is way I learn business, this is way they learn business.

I still imagine Mr. Kim's and Mr. Yoon's children, lonely for their fathers, gratefully eating whatever was brought home to them, our overripe and almost rotten mangoes, our papayas, kiwis, pineapples, those exotic tastes of their wondrous new country, this joyful fruit now too soft and too sweet for those of us who knew better, us near natives, us earlier Americans.

People still vote for what they think they want; they're calling on a bright memory of a time that has gone, rather than voting for and demanding what they need for their children.

while it's easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn't this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?

You never really said anything about what you Koreans believe in she said. Staying out of trouble, I said.

You can keep nothing safe from our eyes and ears. This is your own history. We are your most perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and sad. For only you could grant me these lyrical modes. I call them back to you. Here is the sole talent I ever dared nurture. Here is all of my American education.

the truth is that over the years the calibrations have grown so fine that new equipment was necessarily developed, given how decimal places kept being added, the measuring process itself evolving into a kind of test of our mettle, to see how far we could go in realizing an ultimate standard.

you could only guess whether things were waxing or waning in this existence, and that the best we could ever do was commemorate any beauty.

The question, then, is whether being an "individual" makes a difference anymore. That it can matter at all. And if not, whether we in fact care.

the knitting acted like some kind of mood drug on her, as she conversed with uncharacteristic levity and patience with a voice she was hearing in her head.