Gish Jen Quotes & Sayings

It's a matter of whether you see the self as fundamentally in relationship to other selves or not - whether you see the boundary between self and the world as relatively permeable, which makes you "interdependent" (collectivist) in outlook, or relatively impermeable, which makes you "independent" (individualistic). — Gish Jen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's nothing about interdependence that would keep somebody from making art. — Gish Jen

A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib. — Gish Jen

I hate to generalize because there are always so many exceptions to any rule. — Gish Jen

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

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up with an asymmetrical mouthful of pastry, which he then had to relocate with his tongue to a more central location. This made him look less purposive than he might. Also, croissants were more apt than other breakfast foods to spray little flakes all over one's clean dark suit. Art himself had accordingly never ordered a croissant in any working situation, and he believed that attention to this sort of detail was how it was that he had not lost his job like so many of his colleagues. — Gish Jen

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

Of course he bothers me. He's my husband. — Gish Jen

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

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. — Gish Jen

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

I like to listen. I'm much more interested in listening than in speaking, for sure. — Gish Jen

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

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

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