Free Food for Millionaires Quotes

“Clothing was magic. Casey believed this. She would never admit this to her classmates in any of her women's studies courses, but she felt that an article of clothing could change a person... Each skirt, blouse, necklace, or humble shoe said something - certain pieces screamed, and others whispered seductively, but no matter, she experienced each item's expression keenly, and she loved this world. every article suggested an image, a life, a kind of woman, and Casey felt drawn to them." (Free Food For Millionaires, p.41).”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“It's not that you don't understand, it's that you don't like it.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“COMPETENCE CAN BE A CURSE.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food For Millionaires

“I’m crazy. Poor and stupid. This is the reason why poor people stay poor, you know that? They spend all their money on pride.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food For Millionaires

“choose the important over the urgent.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Don't do what I do but what you think is right. But whatever you do, you can't keep yourself from getting hurt. The heart doesn't seem to work that way.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“For this was love, wasn’t it? To have someone clean up after you, to think about you when you were sick, to not walk away when there was nothing to be gained for the labor required.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“The wife you choose will be your personal and social mirror.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Casey meant it when she said, 'Forgive us for our debts as we forgive our debtors,' because they were for her the hardest words to live by, and by saying them, she hoped they'd become possible. Like Ted, Casey would never discuss her ambivalent views on religion. She was honest enough to admit that her privacy cloaked a fear: the fear of being found out as a hypocrite" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.100-101.)”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Casey glanced at her plate again, recalling the posters of her elementary school lunchroom: YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. So, how much you ate indicated the quantity of your desire. Walter was also implying that how quickly you got your food revealed the likelihood of achieving your goals. She was in fact terribly hungry, but she'd pretended to be otherwise to be ladylike and had moved away from the table to be agreeable, and now she'd continue to be hungry" (Free Food For Millionaires, p.92.)”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Life cost so much money. The craziest thing was that though her debts terrorized her, the desire for more—to eat at the restaurant recommended by the Times, to order the second glass of wine at dinner, to give costly wedding or shower presents, to see the Ring Cycle at the Met, to order an orchid for Ella when she got pregnant—only grew stronger.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Life is filled with many complicated tasks, and no one, Casey, no one can do things alone. It’s very slow going if you choose that path.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food For Millionaires

“Words never mattered' he said, 'seasons mattered. Notice how people behave when they're desperate - that's who they are,' he warned.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Every minute matters. Every damn second. All those times you turn on the television or go to the movies or shop for things you don't need, all those times you stay at a bar sitting with some guy talking some nonsense about how pretty your Korean hair is, every time you sleep with the wrong man and wait for him to call you back, you're wasting your time. Your life. Your life matters, Casey. Every second. And by the time you're my age - you'll see that for every day and every last moment spent, you were making a choice. And you'll see that the time you had, that you were given, was wasted.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Our crowns have been bought and paid for—all we have to do is wear them. —JAMES BALDWIN BOOK”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“If she'd had the cash in her pocket, she would've just given it to him. Money had always been a kind of burden to her. If she had it, she spent it, and when she didn't have it, she worried about how she would live. She wished she had enough so she wouldn't feel so anxious all the time. Would there ever be enough?”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“How could he possibly understand what it would mean for her mother to find her there? She suddenly hated him for being an American and herself for feeling so foreign when she was with him. She hated his ideals of rugged individualism, self-determination—this vain idea that life was what you made of it—as if it were some sort of paint-by-numbers kit. Only the most selfish person on earth could live that way. Casey was selfish, she knew that, but she had no wish to hurt anyone. If her rotten choices hurt her, well then, she’d be willing to take that wager, but it was hard to think of letting her parents down again and again. But her choices were always hurting her parents, or so they said. Yet Casey was an American, too—she had a strong desire to be happy and to have love, and she’d never considered such wishes to be Korean ones.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“But in general, he avoided discussions about religion. There was no way to win them anyway, he thought, why bother. Whichever side you fell on, you had to conclude with the statement « I believe... » rather than « I know. ».”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“It was then that Ella realized she had no mother who'd search for her in this way. She was surprised by how bitterly she felt this lack-for a contingency that would never occur.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Her silence didn’t reflect her intelligence level, contrary to the American view that good talkers were smarter.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food For Millionaires

“It’s possible that the college prizes misled me to believe that I could publish a novel immediately after quitting the law. However, the more I studied fiction, the more I realized that writing novels required rigorous discipline and mastery, no different than the study of engineering or classical sculpture. I wanted to get formal training.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food For Millionaires

“The world was cruel with its rations.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“When she had been a student at Princeton, she and her friends were taught that to consider Ivy League schools as being better than non-Ivies was elitist and vulgar. You would never say a Princetonian was superior to a Queens College graduate. Going to NYU (a top ten business school, but not top five) had taught Casey what her father had insisted all along: Designer labels mattered. The very banks that had refused to recruit at Stern had come to interview twenty-year-olds at Princeton for their undergraduate analyst program. When Casey had been turned down by Kearn Davis her senior year in college, she had not understood then that it was because she had been unwilling to play along (the crazy yellow suit, the Nancy Reagan jokes, and her conceit to apply to only one bank—accurately pointed out by Ted Kim), but at least the firm had come by to take a look. She’d had a door open where she could fail or succeed. There had been a door”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“In life, it seemed that the ones who talked less, ate less, and slept less usually won. She’d picked up a factoid somewhere that said that sharks didn’t sleep. Did winners have fewer needs or did they have greater desires than the losers? Ted’s obvious advantage and ease in this room reminded her of what she’d once heard at a football game at school, that Harvard always won because Princeton thought they were too good to fight, and she thought, Yes, Harvard was winning again”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“The definition of self-control was to choose the important over the urgent.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“All her life she had done things differently from the way she'd been told, and it pleased her to no end to collect the payoff on following her wishes and instincts.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Through clothing, Casey was able to appear casual, urane, poor, rich, bohemian, proletariat. Now and again, she wondered what it'd be like to never want to look like anything at all- instead, to come as you are.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“Every bookish girl in the world is Jane Eyre," he said. "Every girl who wants to be good, anyway.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“In life there were so many things you couldn't afford, yet you couldn't bear to go through it without some hope, and you had to at least visit your wishes periodically. For her, she craved beauty and images of another life, and for Unu, he must've fallen under the allure of chance.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires

“She drank her coffee from a Styrofoam cup and wondered what was the point of rising in the world if the height was so insecure.”
― Min Jin Lee, Free Food for Millionaires