Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

Chang-Rae Lee

• Culture
• Perfect
• Urban

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Quotes to Explore

• I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

  

  Jack Prelutsky
  • Life
  • Different
  • May

• In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.

  

  Jack Horner
  • Future
  • Like
  • See

• Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.

  

  Vidal Sassoon
  • Good
  • Important
  • Kids

• I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.'

  

  Garth Risk Hallberg
  • America
  • Fall
  • Week

• My whole life has been a huge mistake, but what a divine mistake - doing something that I adore.

  

  Manolo Blahnik
  • Life
  • Mistake
  • Doing

• I think Hollywood wants to be safe. The things you do first become your calling card, and I think people just sort of go, 'Well, we know he can do that.' They kind of put you in that hole.

  

  Falk Hentschel
  • People
  • Think
  • Know

• No, but there are people I grew up with from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that would give any person on 'Justified' a run for their money in the scary department.

  

  Walton Goggins
  • People
  • Up
  • Money

• For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

  

  C. J. Cherryh
  • World
  • Art
  • Science

• When I was young, we were taught not to dunk. We were taught not to stand out from the rest of the team. It's different now.

  

  Yao Ming
  • Different
  • Team
  • Rest

• I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.

  

  Mandy Patinkin
  • Mind
  • Change
  • Singing

• I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding behind them... I'd walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging my head against it like I was crazy.

  

  R. Kelly
  • Time
  • School
  • Crazy

• Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

  

  Yusef Komunyakaa
  • World
  • Poetry
  • Human

• In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.

  

  Viktor E. Frankl
  • May
  • Man
  • Action

• I can honestly say that I've done everything I've wanted to do, always. Not without difficulty. But every time I wanted to do something, I just did it, from the age of 18 when I started my own theater with my friends. When I decided I wanted to act. I just bit the bullet.

  

  Gary Sinise
  • Time
  • Done
  • Friends

• Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

  

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Writing
  • Want
  • Corrupt

• I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.

  

  Ralph Fiennes
  • May
  • Power
  • Beliefs

• The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves...

  

  Wendell Berry
  • People
  • Important
  • Survival

• Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

  

  Edgar Degas
  • Drawing

• There was this really rock n' roll guy who was very obviously dragged to my concert by his girlfriend. He had tattoos all over, and he was wearing a Metallica T-shirt. He came up to me said it was one of his favorite concerts because I had reached for his heart and dragged it out and put it in front of his face.

  

  Lou Doillon
  • Up
  • Heart
  • Guy

• I'm not the first to admit that raising a child in Park Slope, Brooklyn, can bear an embarrassing resemblance to the TV show 'Portlandia.' My wife and I try to have some ironic distance from the culture of organic, chemical-free parenting, but we're often participants.

  

  Adam Davidson
  • Free
  • Culture
  • Wife

• I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something more specific in mind for them. I am waiting for the exact perfect situationand then BOOM! I'll explode in a light show of feeling and emotion - a pinata stuffed with tender nuances and pent-up passions

  

  Carrie Fisher
  • Mind
  • Perfect
  • Passion

• I think, in all fields, there's this motherhood pay penalty where, the second you become a mother - and this is true whether you give birth or adopt - you're perceived to not be as committed to your job. Whereas men are perceived as breadwinners who now need more money and promotions because they're fathers.

  

  Nell Scovell
  • Men
  • Money
  • Job

• No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

  

  Chang-Rae Lee
  • Culture
  • Perfect
  • Urban