All Heathens Quotes

“Digging a hole to China, I remember I don't have to do this;

everyone knows they can explore their origins without
fighting off blind cave fish, elusive nematode worms,
giant orb-weaving spiders, the earth's molten core. What if we
head out on a voyage instead? We'll sail all the way around.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“kiss America / learn to love it / until you learn the lyrics by heart.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“/ because you always / sing I'm so excited and I just / can't
hide it / because you always are / and you always can't”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“If a tree falls in the forest
with no European to hear it, did it really exist before the 1500s?”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“Another person commented: "Forgive them
for they do not know what," and it ended

there. None of them know what. But it's fine.
I don't know what. You don't know what.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“He's only human," the commenters

remark on social media, on which all things
are called by their real name. Human.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“There is no irony to the fact
that the abbreviation for saint

is the same as the one for street. Saints are the ground

on which we walk. And without them, we are merely falling or
floating or treading, or we are simply here,

standing with ourselves in our rooms, in our little world.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“I am not sad, no.
My emotional state is hush-colored; that yellow-green shush
of cicadas makes me nothing again”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“My father, the Catholic,

worries about my soul, and this worry appears to me as a vision
in the form of an email

in my inbox, a quote from St. Thérèse, the little saint
of littleness.

Perhaps, he should be worried.

I pray to no saint, and my little sacrifice for the day is to go
to work and to refrain

from picking at the dry patch of skin on
the back of my scalp and smile and smile until
5 p.m.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“On earth,

the body changes. Gravity
yanks, the sun sheds its skin,
people age. People, our bodies:
always at a point of departure.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“Wake up with Mama
on the back of your throat
like the bone of a fish, caught.
Forget that she is long gone.
It’s been almost twenty years.
Longer since she lost her legs.
Remember? Memory travels
through several time zones,
rises up in the air for hours.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“No one
who has died has ever returned, has ever
grown back from the loam. We prayed
for resurrections, but the dead remain
as memories that seem to shrink
in the mind, like an airplane appearing
smaller the further it gets from the ground.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“Your father gave you whatever you wanted, even if it wasn't good for you. That is why you were happy." Hedonism is not natured, but nurtured.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“Not Eve, but Eve's Filipino half sister, bad dancer, lute player, naked and fat, fermenting grains, painting veins with berries and clay, shoots the shit with snake and tree beneath moonlight, while God, Eve, and even Adam make fires in caves, drawing pictures of buffalo and horses on walls, like a bunch of wacko, hallucinating tunnel dwellers.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“I realize now that this story was never about us
being owned, because we will always own ourselves.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“At that party, I wanted
to be liked, which is my tragic flaw. I always find myself
on the street smiling at people who look to be Neo-Nazis.

I call it a safety smile. Rarely do they smile back,
but I would hug them if they needed it, if I think it
would spare me.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino

I should’ve said that all I’ve ever wanted was to own
a fifty-year-old white man (which is what he was),
but I didn’t say that, because it wasn’t true. Instead, I said

nothing, but I almost said, amicably: Yes, our bodies
are banging, aren’t they? Our skin is leather upholstery
beneath the savage sun, our eyes are fruits fallen

from the highest trees, the bottoms of our unshod feet
the color of amethyst.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens

“All the Filipina wives are playing native dancers, and their
husbands are playing conquistadors, because what were

conquistadors if not small-town men with beer breath
wearing plastic armor, holding a figurine of a brown baby

Jesus while a native woman throws them the keys to their
Buick sedan asking them to grab the paper plates.”
― Marianne Chan, All Heathens