Little Gods Quotes

“It must be so terrible to see through everything like you do. It’s a form of blindness, you know. It gives you an excuse to do nothing while feeling superior, when really it’s just selfish, which is another way of saying stupid, lazy, everything you say you hate.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“She was breaking, the edges of her, and through the cracks I saw something terrible, it was dark and powerful and churning, and I recognized with frightening clarity that everything I knew about Su Lan—her excellence, her beauty, her composure—was actually an attempt to control this thing.

I realized that I did not know her, and did not want to.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she things. Desperate to turn their own growing bodies, their own aches and despairs, into material that might reset the axes of worlds. What did it boil down to but children, giddy with breaking rules!”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“In Chinese, I realized, verbs don’t change based on past or present tense. Instead you added a marker to the sentence indicating when an action occurred relative to the moment of speech, and this indication was more akin to an indication of space than of time. So instead of before and after, things happened in front of you and behind you, up the stream and down the stream.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“In the universe, there exist objects that cannot be seen or have not been seen—black holes, undiscovered planets, massive presences of gravity that assure us of their existence simply by the way they affect the behavior of nearby lesser objects. This, according to my mother, was the measure of an object: something that exerts substantial influence over others in its field, drawing continually toward itself, even if ever so slightly. In some ways, this evidence of effect is more necessary than sight. An image alone could be merely a hologram, a vision. No, scientifically speaking, seeing or not seeing is not equivalent to making be or not be. Rather, it is the inevitable attraction and movement of that which surrounds a mass that secures its position among real things.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Later, when Su Lan was my wife, I would often be reminded of the crouching insecurity I had occasionally glimpsed in Bo. It was all rather simple, now that I think of it, the simple insecurity of being born poor. Today, it is clear this was the real reason she chose me over Bo: she was too recognizable to him. It did not matter that he alone, precisely because he had seen every part of her, could truly know her and thus truly love her. She did not want to be known, or perhaps, even, to be loved. She wanted more than anything to amputate that past from her self, to be accepted as the person she’d created, for her lover not to love her, but to make her someone new.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I still enjoy it, being a terror. It’s better than being pathetic. It almost resembles a reason to live.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“According to Su Lan, in physics it is far easier to understand the behavior of massive objects than that of minuscule ones. You would think it should be the reverse, like how it’s more difficult to hold down a large man than to carry a newborn child. But then I thought of children, how they were more surprising and unpredictable than adults, and how as I aged, I felt I was settling into a rigid form, becoming if not someone I understood, then someone whose moods and reactions fell increasingly into patterns I could predict.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Perhaps this was the first time I realized how simple it was to act as if certain parts of the past did not exist.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Liya looks from an airplane window at the curving boundary of ocean and sky below. Impossibly, she is sitting on her mother’s lap; they are going to America. Her mother says, Once we believed the earth was flat. We did not think that two people, flying like birds from the same point in opposite directions, would one day find themselves face-to-face. In a similar way we still misconceive of time. Time is not separate from space, they are in fact two aspects of the same thing. Imagine a sphere like the earth, but drawn in four dimensions instead of three. The fourth dimension, the one we have trouble seeing, is time. Imagine two people starting at the same point in space-time, flying around this new sphere, in opposite directions: one travels in the direction of the future, the other in the direction of the past. Just like the people who circle the earth, these travelers will eventually collide.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“On the edge of the square, staring at the empty expanse, I found myself wanting to be like my mother, wanting to cut away everything. So badly I wanted to be untethered, because to be untethered meant to be undefined, to have a body rinsed of meaning. I didn’t want my feet tied up in history. If the father I never knew was dead, like the mother I knew and didn’t know—I wanted his corpse to be the property of personal grief, not of national tragedy. I was no hero. I wanted to weep only for myself.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Lanlan’s most distinctive, seductive quality was her ability to make you forget every question. Her presence was so exhilarating—sound, smell, taste, disturbance of air of her—that she erased the need for history. She erased even the need for the present. Her beauty was a promise, and so when you were with her it was the future that lit up, materializing endless possibilities and roads, like the network of neurons and synapses in some god’s brain.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Su Lan had a way of making you want to tell her everything. She was not only disarming—she asked as if she understood you perfectly, as if, once you opened the doors, she would be able to walk into your soul, treading gently, and know you only as you knew yourself.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I thought the holy writings were interesting, clever, sometimes even beautiful, but they also seemed clearly to be invented, invented and put into words by someone who was very smart and perhaps a little sly. The most convincing things they spoke of, which regarded the way we ought to move through life, seemed to have little to do with my mother’s superstitions and the daily offerings of incense and expensive foods.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I had never asked my mother about my father. She had not forbidden it; even if I’d had a general feeling that such questions were discouraged, I had no memory of my mother saying, Be quiet, never speak of it again. Had I been a coward? Indifferent, too absorbed in the petty present to care? Or perhaps I’d believed there’d be endless time for the confusions my knowledge might bring. However it came to pass, at a certain point it became too late to ask such questions—too late because it seemed I should already know their answers, and so an admission of ignorance would be an admission of great carelessness—and then (from shame? from sloth?) I turned father into a concept, an emptiness so abstract it was as good as dead.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I never stopped loving my mother. Not exactly. A little pin fell out of the contraption of my love for her; bit by bit it fell apart, until one day I discovered she was my enemy. I never ceased to feel strongly—strongest—about her. Even long after the strength of emotion was no longer adoring, my mother retained an ability to extract, with a word, a glance, a simple tone of voice, the well of everything irrational inside me.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I loved my mother so much during that time; if I’d had the language I would have called her the love of my life and no uttered words in all of time could have been more true. We must have spent nearly every minute of our lives together—I don’t remember any babysitters—and in the hours we were apart, when she had to teach or attend a meeting, I missed her so much I felt as if an arm or a leg had been taken away—no, more, a heart or brain, some part of me that was undoubtedly the best of what I had to offer. But the separations were delicious in their own way, because they made our reunions all the more sweet. Upon my mother’s return I was showered in praise and love. I was so good and brave, not crying or getting myself in trouble, successfully completing whatever game or task she’d assigned before leaving me alone. My mother picked me up and kissed my head and let me wrap my arms around her long neck. She called me guai. At night we went to sleep on the same twin mattress, her arm flung casually over my shoulder, my hand clutching a strand of her hair.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Academia was too stiff, she said, too invested in its own accolades, too worshipful of tradition. Especially in science, which was supposed to be a revolutionary field, all ambition had been drained; the only new ideas that could be accepted were specialized to the point of losing significance. What she was offering would be a paradigm shift, it would require entire textbooks to be rewritten. They were not ready for it, they would see their mistake in ten, twenty, fifty years.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“That was how it was: I wanted desperately to leave her and break her heart, but her heart would not be broken, so I came back, tried to make her love me, tried leaving again.

Now I couldn’t break her heart if I wanted to. Instead, again, finally, she had broken mine.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Truthfully, I convinced myself, I struggled with the lot I had been given: the burden of having more than those around me, of having more than I deserved. That was why I worked so hard; that was why I had once obsessed over checking and rechecking answers I knew were right: I wanted to toil, to earn with my own sweat whatever I got.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I know you think of me as this bright, talented person, a person who will no doubt become something. I think you’re wrong. I’m ambitious, yes, that much is true. But my ambition runs backward, not toward anything but away. In fact, whenever I’ve tried to become something, I’ve failed, because I’ve only really ever managed to care about what I’m not.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“It was for the sake of her work that she made herself beautiful. It scares them, she told me once, poking earrings through her lobes. By them she meant the other physicists in her department, who were mostly men. She had introduced herself at enough institutions, research groups, and conferences to see how her appearance affected her colleagues. It started with surprised confusion—initially she was asked, addressed as xiaojie, what she was looking for, if she was lost. Then came shock and dismissal. She didn’t mind being underestimated. It was a satisfying feeling to prove someone wrong, to know that she would not be underestimated again. After she revealed her intellectual superiority, the result was a kind of terror. Physics professors are not comfortable around beautiful women, she said. She strapped on her high-heeled shoes. It was important to be as tall as the men, so she could make them look her in the eye.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“I went back to sleep that night with ugly, afraid, ashamed feelings, which were gone by morning, burned away by a bright childhood sun.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Every time I saw him, I grew more certain that he did love my mother, that he might, in fact, still love her, as one loves those who are frozen in memory”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“Each time I stop to take measure, I feel not as if I have grown, but as if I have left behind many corpses of former selves.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“my ambition runs backward, not toward anything but away. In fact, whenever I've tried to become something, I've failed, because I've only really ever managed to care about what I'm not.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“In the silence I felt all we knew and did not know about each other. How strange time was indeed, this human time, how it could bind people, pull you away from yourself. There was too much to say so I said nothing.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“trying to say something—trying to say exactly what you mean—was a foray into darkness, where your fears and failures hid—a foray into hell”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“She goes. At the next street she will meet herself, bearing strange consolation, around the next corner she will.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods

“What is this feeling? It is like grief but even hollower, the self draining out through a hole.”
― Meng Jin, Little Gods