Jade Chang Quotes

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

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

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.

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

America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelgänger city that grew in some other America that never really existed.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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,

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

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.

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.

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!