24 Quotes by Jade Chang

How can we be a polis when 95 percent of us would rather watch aging housewives bicker on TV than express a well-formed opinion of our own?

And then something happened: Grayson got beatific.She had heard of people looking like they were lit up from within, but this was the first time she’d seen it. With that “wow”, all his edges and wrinkles smoothed out and the air around him thrummed, like he’d found a note on some universal chord that she still couldn’t even hear, much less play.

How good it made them feel, these well-meaning Upper West Side transplants, buying organic produce they didn’t even have to wash from a handsome black man who would greet them with an exotic fist bump! An attractive, articulate chap, not unlike the young senator from Illinois they had just congratulated themselves for nominating, who would show the world that slavery was behind us and that we could appreciate Hip Hop. Yes! So many pretty boxes to check all at once!

America was a great deceptor. Land of Opportunity. Golden Mountain. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But inside those pretty words, between the pretty coasts, was this: Miles and miles of narrow-minded know-nothings who wanted no more out of life than an excuse to cock their AK-47s and take arms against a sea of troubles.

A satellite, after all, can still look like a star.

Inside the house, where money could reliably fix most problems, things were nearly perfect, but outside, butch nature trampled all over wimpy nurture.

They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.

Throughout history we have believed that markets determine worth and that bubbles are eternal, despite ample evidence to the contrary. In the midst of each bubble, we believe that this time it will last forever. We have all been complicit in our own deluding.” The professor paused. “It’s all bullcrap. There is no market. The market is people, and people are dolts. Even the smartest people are moronic.

Communists had it all wrong. It wasn’t the rich who were imprisoned by their possessions, it was the poor.