Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rage can be so common it turns ambient.
Visibility doesn't always equal freedom.
I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.
Coming out of the closet doesn't always mean liberation.
The 'New York Times' is not reviewing books by non-white people.
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
I'm always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.
Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.
I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!
When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.
I don't think I can ever write about young kids anymore. I completely shot my wad there.
It's okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It's just a performance.
Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.
As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.
As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.
Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'
White people have always slipped in and out of the experiences of people of color and been praised extravagantly for it.
I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.
I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?
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.'
When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap - second love is boring; it's practical. It's what our parents feel for each other.
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?
How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter, and we are not all the same immigrants.
One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.
'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for 'Power Rangers.'
I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.
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.
It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.
If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.
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.
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.
From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.
There's so much of our behavior that kind of curdles and hardens as we get into adulthood, and it becomes so much more difficult to be hopeful and to dream extravagantly.
Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.
People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It's like when you've seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.
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.
I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, 'You have this doll act,' or whatever.
Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.
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.
For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.
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.
Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.
I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me.
I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is - I hate the word 'brand,' but I'm going to use it - it's such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to 'Girls', but also this progressive politics that she's been more vocal about.
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.
When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.
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.