93 Quotes by Jenny Zhang

They were a sign of patronage, a sign of having so much money that it had to be squandered on objects with no purpose except to be beautiful or interesting.

I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay.

Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about 'family' we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.

From that point on, I would refer to him as "your uncle" and he would mostly refer to me as "your aunt" and it would take a longtime for our children to even understand that we were siblings first.

Why did my mother, a grown woman, get to talk like all her hopes and dreams had been shat on, kicked, and set on fire, all the while pushing me, a mere girl, a child, to do better, to accomplish more, to face down all the odds and become a legend? When was I supposed to complain the way they did? To be validated the way they validated each other?

These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians.

Another scar that faded enough to be just another mark we carried.

We are hardest on the people who mirror the shadowy parts of ourselves. The parts we don’t want to see.

[…] until we were living hour to hour, minute to minute, and even then, I still believed in my father, who insisted there had to be something—anything—to look forward to.