AK > AK's Quotes

“When 2014 Boston Marathon champion Meb Keflezighi was asked how long he thought he could continue competing at an elite level, now being over the age of 40, he responded: “If no one ever told you when you were born, how would you know how old you are?”
― Steve Kamb, Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story

“Each day has a color, a smell.”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

“Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state
that makes people want to flee the Earth?"

- Stephen Colbert to Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones,
"The Colbert Report," November 3, 2005”
― Stephen Colbert

“Because the secret of everyone who comes to London—who comes to any big city—is that they came here because they did not feel normal, back at home.”
― Caitlin Moran, How to Be Famous

“As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“All five of Young Wu’s housemates are called names. They compare names. Chink, of course, and also slope, jap, nip, gook. Towelhead. Some names are specific, others are quite universal in their function and application. But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“You wish your face was more—more, something. You don’t know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.”
― Hank Green, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“I am a composite of the women I have loved. I am built and reconstituted from my memories of them: words and embraces exchanged, the smell of their hair and the soap smoothed into their skin.”
― Rachel Vorona Cote, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today

“We cannot remedy the cruelest parts of being human: heartbreak and loss and the torments we endure as we excavate severe self-truths. But we can, I believe, build little harbors for one another.”
― Rachel Vorona Cote, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today