- There is secrecy and betrayal but that’s more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that’s modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.
- I want the flashbacks to feel that once you’re there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it’s written.
- I think that’s great – I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.
- The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the past determines the present.
- For sometimes you can’t help but crave some ruin in what you love.
- A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
- Imagination might not be limitless. It’s still tethered to the universe of what we know.
- For no matter the shadows of an age, the picture of a young couple in love, we are told, speaks most luminously of the future, as the span of that passion makes us believe we can overleap any walls, obliterate whatever obstacles.
- It is ‘where we are’ that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.
- To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
10 inspirational chang-rae lee quotes on success
