Quotes from Chang-Rae Lee

We labor hard for certain but the work is rote and our tomorrows are mostly settled and the way we love one another is cast by the form of our excellent contiguity, a rigorous closeness that only rarely oversteps its bounds.

For let's be honest, who is entirely well, lacking one? I mean throughout your life, so that you can proceed steadily, confidently, and without certain inevitable collapses?

The entire reason is gone, like the old-time writers who at some point found that very few people, if any, actually practiced reading anymore. But at least those writers had time, the change happening over many decades, until readers became rare enough that they were believed to be nearly extinct, like some twitchy, sensitive creatures who lingered in the twilight brush.

It's in the tilting and thrashing that we wangle our luck.

he admired Fan for being Fan, which is to say the kind of person who would keep the right perspective on such qualified information).

I haven't spoken to him since before that. I never understood how he could just drop me like that. Is it a Korean thing? I mean, what kind of person does that?

I wondered if anything would have turned out differently had a careless nurse switched the two of us in a hospital nursery, whether his family would be significantly changed, whether mine would have been, whether any of us Koreans, raised as we were, would sense the barest tinge of a loss or estrangement.

Lelia had great trouble accepting this stunning ignorance of mine...She didn't understand that there weren't moments in our language when the woman's name could have naturally come out.

I better tell you before, I know, but I know you don't like. So what I do?

the most wretched of sights, the just-crushed spirit.

I walked back to the living room and found my father asleep on the sofa, his round mouth pursed and tightly shut, his breath filtering softly through his nose. A single fly, its armored back an oily, metallic green, was dancing a circle on his chin. What he'd brought home from work.

keeping as idly busy as possible on apps and websites, which may be the best inventions for not mourning when you're mourning.

The only noticeable thing was that he would come home much earlier than usual, maybe four in the afternoon instead of the usual eight or nine. He said he didn't want me coming home from school to an empty house, though he didn't actually spend any more time with me.

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this.

la belleza es la bendición más precaria y que, pese a que siempre parece atraer la gloria y la alabanza, quienes la poseen suelen concitar la mezquindad y la malevolencia.

I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine. I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek. 'Good boy,' he muttered. I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers.

He didn't say anything and just helped me to my room...He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.

My writing day follows my family's day. I get a good few hours in the mornings when the kids are out of the house. And I don't work at night any more. I like to see my family.

I don't feel uncomfortable in America, but every once in a while, I'm reminded that people don't see me the way I see me. It doesn't change my life, but it gives me a consciousness about it.

I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.