Jade Chang Quotes & Sayings

She had headed towards town aimlessly, looking for the kind of escape that could be found only in a solitary walk through a crowd. — Jade Chang

In the end, all we had were the people to whom we were beholden. — Jade Chang

All I wanted," Saina thought, "was to make someone feel something." Money can't do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to your emotions - you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can't sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn't have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something - you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing? — Jade Chang

Our first big mistake - we believed that money was rational. Andrew — Jade Chang

How good it made them feel, these well-meaning Upper West Side transplants, buying organic produce they didn't even have to wash from a handsome black man who would greet them with an exotic fist bump! An attractive, articulate chap, not unlike the young senator from Illinois they had just congratulated themselves for nominating, who would show the world that slavery was behind us and that we could appreciate Hip Hop. Yes! So many pretty boxes to check all at once! — Jade Chang

Our second big mistake - we thought that risk could be quantified. Our third big mistake - Alan Greenspan. The — Jade Chang

Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding." The professor paused. "It's all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic. — Jade Chang

...this was what she had been taught: To choose marriage and babies over a glamorous career would be an unthinkable failure. Love was supposed to be the by-product of a life well lived not the goal. And this is what she realized: Everything she had been taught was wrong. — Jade Chang

But she couldn't formulate the sentence in Chinese. Her knowledge of the language only extended to the daily necessities and small affections. — Jade Chang

The people of the world could be divided into two groups: those who used all of their chances, and those who stood still through opportunity after opportunity, waiting for a moment that would never be perfect. — Jade Chang

It's not that he was flirting, unless flirting was just about wanting to really see someone. People thought that someone like him - good-looking, young, cool clothes - was going to be dismissive, and when he wasn't, when he was just easy and open with them, they glowed. It was a feeling he tried to re-create a hundred times a day, in every interaction. It also calmed him. If he looked at someone and they looked at him and there was a true connection, no matter how brief, then it meant that he didn't need to replay the encounter anxiously afterwards, trying to find where it had all gone wrong. — Jade Chang

As many Chinas as there were, there were that many Charleses as well. Every immigrant is the person he might have been and the person he is, and his homeland is at once the place it would have been to him from the inside and the place it must be to him from the outside. — Jade Chang

How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own? — Jade Chang

And then something happened: Grayson got beatific.
She had heard of people looking like they were lit up from within, but this was the first time she'd seen it. With that "wow", all his edges and wrinkles smoothed out and the air around him thrummed, like he'd found a note on some universal chord that she still couldn't even hear, much less play. — Jade Chang

He did it for that bubbling, champagne-in-the-veins high, that desire to be part of someone else's new life, someone else's realised potential.
Vampires must feel like that. — Jade Chang

So, the thing is, my dad, the immigrant, is really, really disappointed that I have an allergy. A peanut allergy. Because immigrants do not believe in allergies. I swear to God, ask any brown person with an accent that you see and they'll tell you that allergies are some New World shit. — Jade Chang

Women, she realized, were scared to be assholes. And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn't mind being an asshole? That was when she birthed her plan: Be an Asshole. — Jade Chang

She said the only true thing I've ever heard anyone say about their mom dying. We were . . . I don't know, it's weird. I think we were laughing about something. We were trying to joke about it, because that's what nobody else ever does, right? And then she looked up at me, and said, 'That bitch just keeps on dying.'" Leo laughed, a low, sardonic guff of it. "Mine, too. Fucking bitches." Saina — Jade Chang

Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture. — Jade Chang

And what people want to own, of course, is real estate. So a dental hygienist with bad credit making forty thousand dollars a year felt that she deserved to park her ass in a million-dollar home. With a little creative financing, and as long as housing prices continued to rise, she believed that she could afford a million-dollar home. And as long as the dental hygienist continued to pay interest on the mortgage for the million-dollar home, as long as housing prices continued to rise, as long as more loan officers approved more loans for more dental hygienists with bad credit who could continue to pay the interest on their overblown mortgages, housing prices would indeed stay stratospheric, and banks could print money based on that certainty. And, like your nursery rhyme, that was the house that Jack built." Kalchefsky — Jade Chang

Charles could feel himself sagging with middle-aged defeat, a loser who lacked the hot-blooded need to wrestle America to the ground and take her milk money, who never had the balls to flip his father's shame into a triumphant empire, who marched obediently towards death and hid from life and always chose the wrong path. No. Not yet. He was still Charles Fucking Wang and he would lead the way out of the wilderness. — Jade Chang

Communists had it all wrong. It wasn't the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor. — Jade Chang

Love saves you, as long as there's a you to be saved. — Jade Chang

And what is any artist, really, but someone who doesn't mind being an asshole? — Jade Chang

I'm not going to be part of this," said Leo. He opened his hand and dropped the flowers. Fragrant, obedient, they beheaded themselves on Saina's salvaged-wood floors. — Jade Chang

How many times did people have to prove that anything could be art before we could finally admit that very little was actually art? Theoretically, — Jade Chang

No one thinks to make the goddess a cup of tea; they just ply her with useless perfumed oils and impotent carved fetishes. — Jade Chang

I give the world thoughtful observations and considered theses, and it gives me back a dozen Kardashians. You know what's going to happen to my library when I sell it? Nothing. Flat nothing. It will probably go to some interior designer who will tell her client how authentic it is. But I'll be damned if a single one of the books are cracked open by their video-game-playing fucktard children! — Jade Chang