Asian Noir Quotes

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm. ~ Tom Vater

So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer."
"Me? How?"
"The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read."
"Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them."
She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at."
"That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops."
"Oh, nuts. ~ Raymond Chandler

Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow's sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos, television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of communication where a story is told or an image created.

It starts with words, and with speech. The first literature in any culture is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation to generation - with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come down to us. In English, the first signs of oral literature tend to have three kinds of subject matter - religion, war, and the trials of daily life - all of which continue as themes of a great deal of writing. ~ Ronald Carter

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. ~ Raymond Chandler

I'd been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I'd seen on TV as a kid.

Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you'll find you're facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro–like scowl, "What the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?"

Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest. ~ Christopher Ryan

And I've met a very wonderful woman," I said.

"They're all wonderful," Haller said.
"Well, many of them," I said.
"I love them," Haller said. "The way they talk, how they smell, the way they touch their hair, everything."
"I know," I said. ~ Robert B. Parker

Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure! Always your goal is pleasure. Pain, yes of course! Yet pain must only be used as a means to add to your sub's sensation of pleasure. To do otherwise is un péché noir - a black sin. Such will tarnish the soul.
André Chevalier ~ Nikki Sex

But I can tell you what I believe: When tens of thousands of innocent souls have perished in Darfur-when 11 million children are without health insurance-when our colossal debt subjects our economic future to the whims of Asian bankers-no one can tell me that faith demands this Senate spend its time arguing over a handful of judges. No one with those priorities can use my faith to intimidate me. ~ John F. Kerry

Growing up, I never saw Asian-Americans on TV at all. ~ Brenda Song

I want you to show him to Zeth and the rest of the Olympian dogs who fight for us. (Noir)
Anything else, Master? Lick your boots? Wipe your ass? (Asmodeus) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

My heritage is something that I have always been aware of, however, some would say that there is a disproportionately low number of Asians as professional athletes. I take pride in trying my best to be a role model to show young Asian American boys and girls that they are only limited by the size of their dreams. ~ Nathan Adrian

There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather. There is a man with wings like a bird.. there is a man who can sea across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite. There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues..In the house above the world the over-people gather..To a fry, mad voice that whispers of earthdeath. ~ Alan Moore

The only thing he likes better than a nice juicy homicide is a sirloin steak smothered with onions. ~ Richard Brautigan

My father in the film - which we probably haven't seen in previous movies, and in British Asian movies you could probably count on one hand - he says exactly why, actually why he's frightened for his daughter. He came to this country, England, and had a bit of a crappy time. ~ Parminder Nagra

Asian Americans haven't had as many opportunities as other people to build their careers in Hollywood, just because there hasn't been that much of an interest, especially in Asian American males. ~ Daniel Wu

I eat kung pao chicken like it's going out of style, but I'm pretty sure I don't have an Asian cell in my body. I love Toni Morrison novels although I'm not black. I'm straight and I'm happily married. The reason I work here is because I think you deserve that, too. ~ Jodi Picoult

When I say hip-hoppers, I mean black, white, Asian, Latino, Chicano, everybody. Everybody. Hip-hop has united all races. Hip-hop has formed a platform for all people, religions, and occupations to meet on something. We all have a platform to meet on now, due to hip-hop. That, to me, is beyond music. That is just a brilliant, brilliant thing. ~ KRS-One

You would kill or enslave everyone? There is so much beauty in the world that they'd destroy. How do you not see it? (Delphine)
Spoken like someone who has only lived in the cushioned world of dreams. You have no idea what the real world is like. What people will do to you when they know they can get away with it. People are absolutely cruel and I say more power to Noir for tearing it down. (Jericho) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The white moth of hope fluttered before her face. ~ Cornell Woolrich

Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents. ~ Alan Dundes

And I don't see that popular measures, self-abnegation and democracy have done anything for Man but push him further into the mud. Currently, popularity endorses degraded novels, self-abnegation has filled the Southeast Asian jungles with stone idols and corpses, and democracy has given us inflation and income tax. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of the Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross that symbolizes divine suffering. 'The cross of Christ ... is God's only self-justification in such a world" as ours....' 'The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak; they rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne; But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak, And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. ~ John R.W. Stott

I was made fun of in the Midwest - I was the only Asian in my graduating class of 200. Fortunately, I found my niche, and it was fine. But I wanted to be so white, you wouldn't believe it. I was like, 'I want to be white; I don't want to be this anymore.' But now I embrace it. ~ Reggie Lee

Film noir has a mood that everyone can feel. It's people in trouble, at night, with a little bit of wind and the right kind of music. It's a beautiful thing. ~ David Lynch

We know that a smarter Australia means a stronger Australia. An Australia able to grasp the opportunities of the Asian Century. A skilled workforce and a strong, productive and resilient economy. We know we'll only win the economic race in the Asian Century if we win the education race. ~ Wayne Swan

There's so much emphasis on the economic might of China, of Southeast Asia, Asian 'Super Tigers' and things like that. But nobody was really looking from the perspective of a family story, of these individuals. ~ Kevin Kwan

For years, I looked to Bruce Lee as a mentor as being a Chinese and Asian man living in this country. ~ Donnie Yen

On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems.

And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the ~ Vladislav Tamarov

I really have to say 'thank you' to our fans, because I think it's difficult for European viewers to find and watch Asian movies, and I hope you enjoy our films. ~ Alan Mak

His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often. ~ Carroll John Daly

Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question. ~ Isaiah Washington

Living in the West, you see how there's only two versions of how Asian men are supposed to be. Either they're very nice, yuppie husbands with children in ads, or they're IT geeks. ~ Kevin Kwan

As sneakily addictive as a game of Pong (which was named, we're told, after the narrator's dad), this zany zip-line of a novel takes the piss out of the Asian-American 'good immigrant' story. Full of charming antiheroes making comically bad choices, the story dazzles us with its absurdity, which makes its eventual wisdom--about lineage, ethnicity, and the meaning of family--all the more wonderfully surprising. ~ Michael Lowenthal

There's still racism. Western Europe ... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others. ~ Hans Rosling

My look is 'Poly'n'Asian' - part Polynesian native, part Asian warrior. ~ Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa

Pre-'Tokyo Drift,' I was like: 'Am I gonna play Yakuza #1 and Chinese Waiter #2 for the rest of my life? Is America even ready for an Asian face that speaks English, that doesn't do Kung Fu?' ~ Sung Kang

I've liked different women at different times in my life. I've been attracted to white women. I've been attracted to black women. I've been attracted to Asian women. I've been attracted to various subspecies of women. I can say with gratitude that I've been able to experiment. ~ Oliver Stone

Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays. ~ Elliott Colla

When I was little, my parents really only wanted me to be a scientist or a doctor; they had never even heard of law school. I think even these days if you were to tell your mother you want to be a fashion designer, or an artist or a writer, a lot of Asian parents would be alarmed because they don't think that's a secure career. ~ Amy Chua

Race is still a powerful force in this country. Any African American candidate, or any Latino candidate, or Asian candidate or woman candidate confronts a higher threshold in establishing himself to the voters ... Are some voters not going to vote for me because I'm African American? Those are the same voters who probably wouldn't vote for me because of my politics. ~ Barack Obama