A Tender Age Quotes

“I can recall the girl’s warm, supple palm, the extra press of it whenever we had to take a tight turn, or step over a log, but now I feel her hand as if my hand were my friend’s, each clench of hers a tiny pulse of his defeat.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“Dahlia asked us to spread our arms and legs as wide as we could. “Let’s make ourselves sails for this kindest of energies. We’re harnessing the greatest power of all, which is the power of forgiveness.” Of course we had constant reminders of this at our home churches, and from Reverend Hahm and the youth pastor here at camp, the countless object lessons of Our Savior Jesus Christ, but then Dahlia added, “It’s the power to forgive the world, my dear ones. And that means forgiving yourself, too.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“What frightens us most is to know how good we can be,” Dahlia said after we finished. “Let’s not be scared anymore. Let’s not hold ourselves back.” This provoked an extra-sharp hoot from Ben Frost, his outburst startling us.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“Yes, she was wonderful, yes, I was coveting her, but I was happy for her, too, maybe in thrall to her, I wanted people to know the jagged rent in my chest for how fantastic she was so that we could celebrate her simply being around us. It was the first time in my life that such an amplitude of feeling had nothing to do with me.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“And I grasped, finally, who and what Dickens was, this pointed and maybe unending draw on your energies, this drain of a person who swirled away any good feeling until there was nothing left except a parched sting in your mouth.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“They were a beautiful couple, they strolled with such a lovely sway of languor and I think of them still whenever someone says A match made in heaven. Of course, that’s just a dream. None of us is meant for a destined other, we are lucky or we are not, the fullest feelings of our lives drawn from the serial consequences of certain times and places.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“Susan was a different story. Aside from plain liking her, maybe loving her, thinking she was perfectly fantastic, she was nervy and vigilant, and the idea of telling her untruths was ludicrous; she’d see right through me before I could unfurl the first limp threads. But there was also a somber feeling I had that she was trying to stay ahead of something that was invisible but building, a vast force like a tsunami. I was too young to understand it, but I can see now that her quirky energy and wild charm were a form of running, her head start against that wave that would inevitably come for her. And you can’t outrun that.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“I didn’t know what to say. I probably did think it was normal, for I knew nothing outside of our parochially secure if periodically beleaguered immigrant existence.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“I still think about those times, more often than makes any sense in the wider context of my life. This is the nature of certain youthful happenings, how they can become a knot in the flesh that every other occurrence must bypass in order for you to know yourself, in order for you to grow.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“Her mode was to be aggressive and menacing, and most fearsome in one of our favorite games, Running Bases. It’s a classic game where there are two catchers, each posted at a base, and everyone else, after three initial throws, running between them in a baseball-type rundown. If you got tagged you were out. The last remaining runner won, and then the two who’d been tagged first would have to be the catchers for the next round.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“The secret to happiness is to be able to deceive yourself. You push on when there is no evidence that you should.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“I wasn’t aware of it then, but the aggrieved harbor their own brand of vanity.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age

“It wasn’t that furious, bloody attraction one can have, when the iron in your veins can get clumped up simply by proximity to a like spirit, but a fascination with what they all had in common, which was the capacity, or the curse, of being able to step outside of a moment in order to commit some transgressive act, to not feel what they ought to feel, and thus fully, purely, keep separate, if usually for the worse. I realized that I admired this capacity, because I knew that it was a capacity I had, too, whether I could admit it or not.”
― Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age