Cantonese Chow Quotes

I used to be more glamorous. ~ China Chow

Over a bowl of noodles [the younger Cantonese man] waxed eloquent on the subject of mantras. 'Ordinary people, Ah Jon, use mantras as spells to win good fortune or ward off disease and other evils. Perhaps they are right to do so, for the mantras are often successful, but I do not ask you to believe that. What I beg you to believe is that they are of the greatest help in altering states of consciousness. They do this by making your mind stay still instead of chasing after thoughts.'

He went on to explain that, being devoid of meaning, they do not promote conceptual thought as prayers, invocations and so forth are apt to do; and that, as each mantra has a mysterious correspondence (he could not explain what kind of correspondence) with the various potentialities embedded deeply in our consciousness […] it could cause one to snap into a state otherwise hard to reach. I do not remember his actual words, but I do remember that he was the first to voice an idea which was later to be abundantly confirmed by my own experience. […] he went on to say that to use meaningful words in any kind of religious practice is useless, since words encourage dualistic thought which hinders the mind from entering upon a truly spiritual state. His last words […] were: 'People who pray with words are just beginners. Don't do it!' Several passengers who understood English glanced at him as though they thought him a bit mad and I myself was quite taken aback by his un-Chinese vehemence, but ~ John Blofeld

I'm about to start working with a singer I met on my last trip: she'll get international exposure, and I'll have a song out in that market sung in Cantonese. ~ Paul Oakenfold

[O]ur segment of the picture consists only of tired and dirty soldiers who are alive and don't want to die; of long darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of chow lines and atabrine tablets and foxholes and burning tanks and Arabs holding up eggs and the rustle of high-flown shells; of jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding rolls and C rations and cactus patches and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tenets and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter too, and anger and wine and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves. ~ Ernie Pyle

Mental illnesses grab you by the leg, screaming, and chow you down whole.They make you selfish. They make you irrational. They make you irrational. They make you self-absorbed. They make you needy. They make you cancel plans last minute. They make you not very fun to spend time with. They make you exhausting to be near. ~ Holly Bourne

Sometimes earning awards doesn't matter as much as earning revenue or profit, or having a good response from the audience. No matter how many awards you win, if you can't earn any profit from your movie, if the audience doesn't like it, then it doesn't matter how many awards you get. ~ Stephen Chow

With the balcony doors completely open and folded up, his small room acquired an infinite vista. Somewhere on the horizon, water finally worked up the courage to embrace the sky. ~ Clara Chow

Every project for me is a risk that I bet on. I believe my senses, and hopefully it will be successful. But sometimes you make it, and sometimes you fail. ~ Stephen Chow

Making art is different for everyone. ~ China Chow

To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time. ~ Stephen Chow

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would have my very own school - no way. And I had no idea I'd be coaching girls. It's wild. ~ Liang Chow

To articulate who I hope will pick up this book and take a read: I imagine it being those who find themselves living in the tension between intellectual pursuit and passionate action. Neither ~ Bruce Reyes-Chow

Cantonese will eat anything in the sky but airplanes, anything in the sea but submarines, and anything with four legs but the table. ~ Amanda Bennett

I was born in Scotland and have lived there all my life. I speak conversational Cantonese with my dad when I'm at home, and very basic Mandarin. ~ Katie Leung

Subect: Sigh.
Okay. Since we're on the subject...
Q. What is the Tsar of Russia's favorite fish?
A. Tsardines, of course.
Q. What does the son of a Ukranian newscaster and a U.S. congressman eat for Thanksgiving dinner on an island off the coast of Massachusetts?
A.?
-Ella

Subect: TG
A. Republicans.
Nah.I'm sure we'll have all the traditional stuff: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes. I'm hoping for apple pie. Our hosts have a cook who takes requests, but the island is kinda limited as far as shopping goes. The seven of us will probably spend the morning on a boat, then have a civilized chow-down. I predict Pictionary. I will win.
You?
-Alex

Subect: Re. TG
Alex,
I will be having my turkey (there ill be one, but it will be somewhat lost among the pumpkin fettuccine, sausage-stuffed artichokes, garlic with green beans, and at least four lasagnas, not to mention the sweet potato cannoli and chocolate ricotta pie) with at least forty members of my close family, most of whom will spend the entire meal screaming at each other. Some will actually be fighting, probably over football.

I am hoping to be seated with the adults. It's not a sure thing.

What's Martha's Vineyard like? I hear it's gorgeous. I hear it's favored by presidential types, past and present.
-Ella

Subject: Can I Have TG with You?
Please??? There's a 6a.m. flight off the island. I can be back in ~ Melissa Jensen

When I was younger, my coach, Liang Chow, made all the decisions. I would go to the gym for practice, do exactly what Chow told me to do, go home, come back and start all over again. If Chow told me to do 50 squat jumps, I did 50 squat jumps. ~ Shawn Johnson

Understand that I am even ignored by the opposite sex on the internet. ~ Vann Chow

It was lonely to be so perfect in all respects. ~ Vann Chow

In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I'd eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick and red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman's Wharf  -  nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and french-fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that's my ah-dream of San Francisco… ~ Jack Kerouac

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness ... towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment ... Ah ... Nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people.
Those were not his dumplings. ~ Cory Doctorow

People who believed in God today will doubt him tomorrow and those who doubted him today will believe in him tomorrow because believing in someone else doesn't work. Believe in yourself. ~ Vann Chow

If first of all you have a wrong idea, then it's kind of wasting time. No matter how hard that you try with a wrong idea, it makes it difficult to be successful. ~ Stephen Chow

I was very poor. As a child my dream was to have a leather football. ~ Stephen Chow

It is fine to be all focused on gymnastics if that is what you want to do, but once you are finished with gymnastics, what are you going to do? ~ Amy Chow

On the balance beam, sometimes it's really hard to stay on if you're having some rough times. ~ Liang Chow

The only times I'm consistent about praying are when I'm on an airplane or when an ambulance goes by. ~ China Chow

Better wash up," mom says. "We'll be eating in a few minutes."
I glance toward her mixing bowl, in which she's blending something resembling Cat Chow.
Dad grimaces at the sight of it. "What do you say, Camelia?" he says. "Maybe after dinner and I can head over to Flick-tastic to rent a couple videos?"
Translation: Let's save ourselves from this swill by hitting the drive-through of Taco Bell. ~ Laurie Faria Stolarz

I was a young man, and this is the kind of London it was, but so many people are just not here anymore. Not even Tina [Chow], who was to me absolutely the most important girl of the time. Tina was absolutely the chicest thing, the way she kept herself, the way she moved. You're born like that - you cannot acquire it. All those upper-class girls, people like Catherine Tennant, they used to be there in Chelsea, sitting on the couch. Now Chelsea is full of Russians. ~ Manolo Blahnik

In China, I lived in a dormitory, and the government paid for everything - food, buses. In Iowa, I had to run after the bus, and cook for myself. The first weeks in the U.S., I was asking, 'Where is my food?' ~ Liang Chow

Between the new, happy him, and the old, depressing him, there stood in the way only his lack of imagination. ~ Vann Chow

I love mixing prints. The costume designer for 'Pair of Kings' and I have actually incorporated the trend for my character 'Mikayla.' ~ Kelsey Chow

There was nothing so special about First Class, apart from the amount of uncalled for, almost disturbing, attention I got from the various six-feet tall heavily made up air hostesses, that I would come back for more given the steep price tag. ~ Vann Chow

Life is like a beer. When the bubbles blew over, that was when the beer started. The beer is only half as good without the foam. ~ Vann Chow

Japanese are one of the most punctual people he had ever worked with. They could, he imagined, put the Germans to shame in their high expectation for timeliness. ~ Vann Chow

Dance and theatre afforded me the opportunity to discover my passion for acting, for telling stories. ~ Kelsey Chow