Real Americans Quotes

“Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“But most people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“As a parent, she had sought to do the opposite of what her mother had done - not expecting Nick to resemble her, not burdening him with her expectations. And yet was she any different? Could love between a mother and child be anything less than completely overwhelming?”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none - we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“I wanted to tell Betty's granddaughter that it wasn't too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions - that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“I'd thought transporting me to another setting was all that was needed to render me normal. I'd failed to consider that I might be the same person here.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn't. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“How thoughtless we had been, to believe that trees needed to be useful, or that usefulness was even the point.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“It was books, the immense volume of them, that opened my eyes to how little we understood about the world we inhabited: a world that appeared ordinary in its dailiness yet contained mysteries upon mysteries, one door opening onto another.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“In the act of giving I conceded that I had more than I needed, and someone had far less than they did. It was for no real reason, it wasn't fair. It shattered the illusion of my own free will - that I had made choices, and those choices had resulted in my life.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Aren't we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it's you and I who are here - winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and water formed; it was able to hold an atmosphere. And in this place, on this small blue rock, innumerable miracles: redwoods, computers, stingrays, pianos, you and me.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable—more remarkable—for the fact of differences. Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“What had life been, before him? It hardly mattered. Love was indistinguishable from possibility.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“I want to be less afraid of friends’ judgment and more enthralled by their perspectives.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“The mother wore an expression of exhaustion that I remembered so well. She had surrendered: inviting the discomfort, not refusing it. Pain was easier to tolerate when you didn’t resist it.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“I would always feel guilty toward her. Was guilt the right word? I just mean there could never be a righting of the scales. Why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place?”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“This was what love had always been for me - denying your own reality in order to protect another person.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“So I switched my major to art history. In the end, I wasn't the sort of person who yearned to shape a landscape. I wanted only to observe it.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“John and I watched the sky shift, to pink, then blue, or more often gray, which was how it stayed most days, beyond the trees, silver as a shell. The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Love irrigated everything with new meaning.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“It had been our dream, Otto's and mine: to give our children the best possible futures. But it was a mistake, believing you could choose for someone else, no matter how well intentioned you might be. And what did we choose, really? We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none--we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Once she had believed that connection meant sameness, consensus, harmony. Having everything in common. And now she understood that the opposite was true: that connection was more valuable--more remarkable--for the fact of differences. Friendship didn't require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“She wasn't normal and so I wasn't either. I resented that part the most.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“People called me quiet, inscrutable, and that was fine with me. There was no shortage of opinions here; I didn't need to have another.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Somehow I was self-absorbed without even knowing who I was, or who I should be - an exasperating combination.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“It was a habit, with my parents: omitting information, not wanting to worry them unnecessarily. Though they’d raised me so American, I could never manage the sorts of American relationships my friends had with their parents, where they talked to them like friends.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans

“Betty often complained about her. Whenever Betty needed something, her granddaughter seemed inconvenienced, acted as though Betty were interrupting her very important life. Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone. Last spring, Betty twisted her ankle. She refused to tell her family. She insisted it was nothing major. Instead, I became her impromptu nurse. We both cracked up at my incompetence, before we grew somber with the realization: There would come a day when one of us grew sick, or fell, or couldn’t climb our stairs, or we both did, and then what would happen? But here Betty had died on me. It was her way out of being my caretaker, I thought, laughing to myself. I wanted to tell Betty’s granddaughter that it wasn’t too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”
― Rachel Khong, Real Americans