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.
Quotes to Explore
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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.
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In the future, I'd like to see paleontology as a whole get a lot more quantitative.
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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.
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Keep your debt low, and ask, Can your operational expertise make an impact? Then you're taking away a lot of the risk.
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I had one week in the fall of 1996 where I was like, 'I'm America's greatest living teenage poet.'
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Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.
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My whole life has been a huge mistake, but what a divine mistake - doing something that I adore.
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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.
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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.
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For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
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I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.
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The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.'
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This is the political culture of the United States, which one should accept as is. The United States is a great country and it deserves non-interference and no third-party comments.
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I am not an optimist. I'm a very serious possibilist. It's a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
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One should arrive at leading one's conscience to a state of development so that it becomes the voice of a better and higher self, of which the ordinary self is a servant.
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The god of war is impartial: he hands out death to the man who hands out death.
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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.
