Don Lee Quotes

#1. 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?

Don Lee

#2. 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.

Don Lee

#3. Youth is about promise.

Don Lee

#4. 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.

Don Lee

#5. There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.

Don Lee

#6. 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.

Don Lee

#7. At what point is it acceptable to give up?

Don Lee

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

Don Lee

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

Don Lee

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

Don Lee

#11. 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.

Don Lee

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

Don Lee

#13. 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.

Don Lee

#14. 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.

Don Lee

#15. 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.

Don Lee