Best 17 quotes of Gish Jen on MyQuotes

Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be.

A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib.

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

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

I hate to generalize because there are always so many exceptions to any rule.

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

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

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).

That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special - these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter.

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.

... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

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.

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

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.

He would not want to sound like a haunted man; he would not want to sound as though he was calling from a welfare hotel, years too late, to say Yes, that was a baby we had together, it would have been a baby. For he could not help now but recall the doctor explaining about that child, a boy, who had appeared so mysteriously perfect in the ultrasound. Transparent, he had looked, and gelatinous, all soft head and quick heart; but he would have, in being born, broken every bone in his body.

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