Gish Jen Quotes

#1. 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.

Gish Jen

#2. A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

#4. 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.

Gish Jen

#5. 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.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

#7. 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.

Gish Jen

#8. Chinese language tends to be quick, economical. To know what people are saying, you always need to know what the context is.

Gish Jen

#9. It's human to hear stories and to know how people live and to imagine how that is for them. It's very interdependent!

Gish Jen

#10. There's nothing about interdependence that would keep somebody from making art.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

#12. The independents are the ones who tend to commit suicide. I'm not against this way of being in the world. Individuals have brought us many treasures. You can't just say that's a bad way of being in the world - it's not. But it's not everyone's way of being in the world.

Gish Jen

#13. For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

#15. That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special - these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

Gish Jen

#16. I think that there is a bias in the current literary climate, which is not only very Western but very male.

Gish Jen

#17. I like to listen. I'm much more interested in listening than in speaking, for sure.

Gish Jen

#18. When I think about why I would be a writer, why I should continue to be a writer, it seems to me one of the few things you can dowhere you're never bored.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

#20. I'm trying to give people an idea of what black looks like and what white looks like before I introduce them to gray.

Gish Jen

#21. There is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

Gish Jen

#22. I hate to generalize because there are always so many exceptions to any rule.

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen

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

Gish Jen