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

• Keep your debt low, and ask, Can your operational expertise make an impact? Then you're taking away a lot of the risk.

  

  Dan Gilbert
  • Risk
  • Impact
  • Debt

• 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

• Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.

  

  Ilya Ehrenburg
  • Character
  • Today
  • Knowledge

• 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

• Nature doesn't need people - people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature.

  

  Harrison Ford
  • People
  • Nature
  • Culture

• Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

  

  Drew Houston
  • Life
  • Trying
  • Freedom

• I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

  

  Daniel Libeskind
  • Time
  • Believe
  • Future

• I definitely have hips, and I'm shorter, so I like to make my legs look longer. I'll wear shorts or pants that elongate my legs. I'm not a tiny, skinny toothpick. I definitely like to show off my waist and my butt.

  

  Jenna Ushkowitz

• 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