22 Quotes by Gish Jen

...even if we returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us. Something beyond algorithms and beyond Upgrades-- something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.

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

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.

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

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

A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so.

Many women tend toward the interdependent end of things, we tend to see ourselves in relationship to others to a far greater degree than men.

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

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