Native Speaker Quotes

“I'm a B+ student of life.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“He said you could tell about a person not from what he believed, but by what worried him.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“And perhaps most I loved this about her, her helpless way, love it still, how she can't hide a single thing, that she looks hurt when she is hurt, seems happy when happy. That I know at every moment the precise place where she stands. What else can move a man like me, who would find nothing as siren or comforting?”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“This is how we were meant for each other. How we make our living. The lives of frustrated poets and imposters. This, too, how the love works and then doesn't: a mutual spectacle of imagination.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I wonder if my father, given the chance, would have wished to go back to the time before he made all that money, when he just had one store and we rented a tiny apartment in Queens. He worked hard and had worries but he had a joy then that he never seemed to regain once the money started coming in. He might turn on the radio and dance cheek to cheek with my mother. He worked on his car himself, a used green Impala with carburetor trouble. They had lots of Korean friends that they met in church and then even in the street, and when they talked in public there was a shared sense of how lucky they were, to be in America but still have countrymen near.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I would give most anything to hear my father's talk again, the crash and bang and stop of his language, always hurtling by. I will listen for him forever in the streets of this city.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“The truth, finally, is who can tell it. ”
― Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Sometimes, when he wanted to hide or not outright lie, he chose to speak in English. He used to break into it when he argued with my mother, and it drove her crazy when he did and she would just plead, "No, no!" as though he had suddenly introduced a switchblade into a clean fistfight.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“In every betrayal dwells a self-betrayal.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“The constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go. (1998: 319)”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“She believed that displays of emotion signaled a certain failure between people. The only person who could upset her, make her cry or laugh in the open, was my father. He could always unsettle her face with a stern admonition or an old joke or pun in Korean. Otherwise, I thought she possessed the most exquisite control over the muscles of her face. She seemed to have the subtle power of inflection over them, the way a tongue can move air.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I've read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance above and no matter who they are or how old, they gain a wisdom from that last vista. But we are the living, remaining on the ground, and what we know is the narrow and the unbroken. Here, we are strewn about in in the lengthy expanse of an archipelago, too far to call one another, too far to see.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Or maybe another baby might have helped us. Another try. Of course, that's the worst reason to have a child, anyone on the street can tell you that, because no one can handle being an attempt at something from the very start, (1998: 200)”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“The men I've been with have this idea to make me over. I feel like a rock in some boy's polishing kit. I go in dull, scratched up, and then rumble rumble whirr, I'm supposed to come out precious and sparkling again."
"Does it work?"
"They seem to think so."
"How do you feel?" I asked.
"A little smaller." (1998: 148- 149)”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I knew I could have tried to comfort her, perhaps telling her how John Kim was probably just as hurt as she was and that his silence was more complicated than she presently understood. That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this. We perhaps depend too often on the faulty honor of silence, use it too liberally and for gaining advantage. I showed Lelia how this was done, sometimes brutally, my face a peerless mask, the bluntest instrument. (1998: 88-89)”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“In America, he said, it’s even hard to stay Korean.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“It is in the rules, a woman like that. There is no choice. With someone like Sophie, you are part of a greater agency, you make sure things are going right for her. If she is not mean-spirited or too selfish, you fall in love. You grow up, you become a man, you realize you have clear responsibilities. Then you are truly with her. You are partners.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me. In this sense I am not a seducer. I am hardly seen. I won't speak untruths to you, I won't pass easy compliments or odious offerings of flattery. I make do with on-hand materials, what I can ship out of you, your natural ore. Then I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity.”
― Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write it on the sticker, and then have me press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Everybody, she says, has been a good citizen. She will say the name, quickly write it on the sticker, and then have m press it to each of their chests as they leave. It is a line of quiet faces. I take them down in my head. Now, she calls out each one as best as she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“He was how I imagined a Korean would be, at least one living in any renown. He would stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat person in between. I found him most moving and beautiful in those moments. And whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I still shattter a little inside. Within every echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy, and then even the fitful mumblings of our Ahjuhma, the instant American inventions of her tongue. They speak to me, as John Kwang could always, not simply in new accents or notes but in the ancient untold music of a newcomer's heart, sonorous with longing and hope.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Every means and source of struggle. They peeled and sorted and bunched and sprayed and cleaned and stacked and shelved and swept; my father put them to anything for which they didn't have to speak. They both had college degrees and knew no one in the country and spoke little English. The men, whom I knew as Mr. Yoon and Mr. Kim, were both recent immigrants in their thirties with wives and young children. They worked twelve-hour days six days a week for $200 cash and meals and all the fruit and vegetables we couldn't or wouldn't sell; it was the typical arrangement. My father like all successful immigrants before him gently and not so gently exploited his own.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: you worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church. You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“Don't shame him! Your father is very proud. You don't know this, but he graduated from the best college in Korea, the very top, and he doesn't need to talk about selling fruits and vegetables. It's below him. He only does it for you, Byong-ho, he does everything for you. Now go and keep him company...I would learn in subsequent years that he had been trained as an industrial engineer, and had actually completed a master's degree.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“He didn't say anything and just helped me to my room...He gently patted my back and then left the house and drove off to one of his stores in the city.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I told him I would go up there; he said no, no, everything was fine. I drove up anyway and when I opened the door to the house he was sitting alone in the kitchen, the kettle on the stove madly whistling away. He was fast asleep; after the stroke he sometimes nodded off in the middle of things. I woke him, and when he saw me he patted my cheek. 'Good boy,' he muttered. I made him change his clothes and then fixed us a dinner of fried rice from some leftovers.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“That perhaps the ways of his mother and his father had occupied whole regions of his heart. I know this.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“The only noticeable thing was that he would come home much earlier than usual, maybe four in the afternoon instead of the usual eight or nine. He said he didn't want me coming home from school to an empty house, though he didn't actually spend any more time with me.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

“I walked back to the living room and found my father asleep on the sofa, his round mouth pursed and tightly shut, his breath filtering softly through his nose. A single fly, its armored back an oily, metallic green, was dancing a circle on his chin. What he'd brought home from work.”
― Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker