Best 9 quotes of Jade Chang on MyQuotes

All I wanted," Saina thought, "was to make someone feel something." Money can't do that. Just looking at a dollar bill did nothing to your emotions — you have to make money or lose money for it to make you feel anything. You can earn it, win it, lose it, save it, spend it, find it, but you can't sell it because you never really own it. On the other hand, you didn't have to possess a song or a sculpture for it to make you feel something — you only had to experience it. So why did collectors want to collect? What feeling were they pursuing?

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.

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

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.

Giant canvases that glorified her naked breasts and half smile, songs rhyming Saina and wanna, unfinished novels about an unknowable girl of dreams – none of that (and she’d had all of it) was as romantic as a boyfriend who would notice that the lightbulb in her hallway had blown out and change it without even bothering to mention the favour.

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.

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

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