Gish Jen Quotes

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

To have no particular aim was to open grand possibilities...

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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