Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Jenny Zhang - Page 2

Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?

It's weird for me to say I'm lucky when I can't go into a bookstore and have more than five choices if I want to read something about Asian-American characters.

Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate - and above all there was song.

While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with me.

How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.

Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.

That's what people expect: They don't want to read a slight novel. People don't want to waste their time on anything less than 'great.'

The 'New York Times' is not reviewing books by non-white people.

The reader who likes my stories, I think they would see the violence on the surface, but I think they would also see a deeper violence - the one that's not as showy or as immediately arresting, but kind of the more unsolvable violence that lurks underneath.

Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.

Michael Derrick Hudson is not the first person to slip into the identity of a person of color to give himself some perceived advantage. He can slip back into his life and not walk around in this world as a person of color who endures racism.

Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.

I don't think I can ever write about young kids anymore. I completely shot my wad there.

The historical legacy of 'The Best American Poetry' is they've had very few editors who were not white. They've had very few instances where they've selected poems by non-white poets.

Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.

I'm surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.

I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they're also very attuned to those moments.