Weike Wang Quotes

When he first meets the dog, I cannot read his face. It is a blank face. But everywhere he goes, the dog follows.
He allows him on the hardwood but not on the carpet. He allows him on the carpet but not on the couch. When the dog cries at night from fear of being alone, he sleeps next to him on the floor.

A joke: What do you do with a sick chemist?
Helium. Or curium. Or barium.

An ideal world: money falls from the sky and into my lap for each word that I write. A one-dollar flat rate. A twenty for a real zinger.

Genetics aside, I don't see myself having kids.
Not one? Eric asks.
If I had one, I would want to have two, and if I had two, I'd would want to have zero.

I am supposed to be helping her prepare for the GRE. Instead, we spend most of the time talking about color. The color of my clothes and shoes. The color of other people's clothes and shoes. The color of the sky when the sun has dipped just low enough to cause red light to bend the most and then, voilà, a sunset.

The mark of a poor comedian is not making the other person laugh. The mark of a worse comedian is asking if the person got it.

The next day, I get a call from this student's mother.

My daughter has said nothing about the GRE. All she ever talks about is color. Is color on the GRE?

No, It's not. But it should be.

What are you really teaching her?

How to make sense of sunsets.

But, I tell myself, Weight is just an artifact of gravity. If this were a jazz club on the moon, I would weigh less.

As a child, I get new clothes so rarely that when I do, I put off wearing them. It then happens that when the big day comes, the clothes no longer fit.

My mother has a theory about hair. It is that the longer the hair grows, the dumber a person becomes. She warns that too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.

One thing he says: If you could be an emotion, it would be spite.

One thing I say: If you could be an animal, it would be a sloth.

But I only say that out of spite.

China is twelve hours ahead, she tells me. It is always in the future.

I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle flying around in space.

In the mind of a scientist, beauty is simplicity. The most elegant experiment is the one that takes no time to set up and gives the answer to every question.

It is a strange sensation to not be entirely at home in either language. I am more comfortable in English, but Eric says that he can still tell I am not a native speaker-- Your idioms are always a little off and you say close for everything. Close the lights, the TV, the oven. You say close when you really mean turn off.

Because in Chinese, there is only one word for it. Guan.

An equation.

happiness = reality - expectations
If reality > expectations, then you are happy.
If reality < expectations, then you are not.

A Chinese proverb predicts that for every man with great skill, there is a woman with great beauty. In ancient China, there are four great beauties: The first so beautiful that when fish see her reflection they forget to swim and sink. The second so beautiful that birds forget how to fly and fall. The third so beautiful that the moon refuses to shine. The fourth so beautiful that flowers refuse to bloom. I find it interesting how often beauty is shown to make the objects around it feel worse.

Another theory about hair, not from my mother, but from the best friend. A woman who cuts her hair drastically is set to make some decisions.

Play with your dolls for not more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You're a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.

A habit that forms from this is that I can ask Eric questions when he is asleep.

Once I hear the first snore, I say, Why is your trajectory so straight? Why is your family so nice? It seems unfair how easy everything comes to you. In your last life you must have been a dung beetle. Or someone who gave up his life for someone else. Perhaps a pregnant woman crossing the street.

Do you remember?

Then I part his autumn hair and bring my voice down to a whisper. Please stop, just for a little while, and let me catch up. How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up?

In spoken Chinese, everything is gender neutral. There is no she or he. The more I think about this now, the more I like this about the language. Man or woman? Does it matter? A person.

In a letter to his daughter, Einstein wrote that love is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will. He posited to be the universal force scientists have overlooked.

Don't just break it off for the sake of it. Don't do something drastic just to prove a point.

If she has cried, she has not done so in front of me. She has done so in the shower where it is hard to tell.

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half in liquid state and half in gaseous, both of which is probably poisonous.

You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally.

You have a brain and two hands, look up the answer yourself. You want to know how to get through life? Pay attention.

At our next session, the shrink calls this metaphor psychological warfare. You must rise above it, she says. They're just words being said many miles away.

That phrase about sticks and stones and bones.

But my bones are very brittle. And I am lactose intolerant.

All comedies end in marriage. All tragedies end in death. But what about everything else in between? Life happens in the middle, I heard someone very smart say.

Extraordinary, some people have said when he speaks now of how he got here.
Through hard work, he says, and the learning of advanced math.
Amazing, others have said.
But such progress he's made in one generation that to progress beyond him, I feel as if I must leave America and colonize the moon.