Best 10 quotes in «chinatown quotes» category

I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.

I guess 'The Player' was a pretty good L.A. movie. And 'Chinatown.' Was there ever a better L.A. movie about a certain period in L.A.? That was terrific.

You're dumber than you think I think you are.

You must be dumber than you think I think you are.

Anna lifted her chin, “Forgive my interruption, Mr. President, but I am Assistant Matron Anna Blanc, and I’ve come about the singsong girls.” She remembered herself and bowed. No one bowed back. They simply stared at her. After a moment, Tom Foo Yuen said, in his tar-thick accent, “You are a brave, strange woman, Matron Blanc.” Anna had heard that before.

Yes, yes," Gee Sook said. "Look how Jung stands like a man today.

I found Chinatown both impossibly sophisticated and unbearably out of vogue. Chinese restaurants were a guilty pleasure of mine. I loved how they evoked the living world- either the Walden-like sense of individualism of the Ocean or Happy Garden, or something more candid ("Yummies!"). Back home they had been a preserve of birthdays and special celebrations: a lazy Susan packed with ribs and Peking duck, rhapsodically spun to the sound of Fleetwood Mac or the Police, with banana fritters drenched in syrup and a round of flowering tea to finish. It felt as cosmopolitan a dining experience as I would ever encounter. Contextualized amid the big-city landscape of politicized microbreweries and sushi, a hearty table of MSG and marinated pork felt at best crass, at worst obscurely racist. But there was something about the gloop and the sugar that I couldn't resist. And Chinatown was peculiarly untouched by my contemporaries, so I could happily nibble at plates of salt and chili squid or crispy Szechuan beef while leafing through pages of a magazine in peace.

While we played, Meiying often sat by herself on the bench, huddled against the chill, looking at the library books on her lap, the pages glowing under the street lamp. The pages would sometimes turn in the wind, but she did not notice.

Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways return might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.