Chang-rae Lee

“In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.”

“Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?”

“Does any (MFA) program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?”

“For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.”

“Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.”

“Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?”

“But maybe it’s the laboring that gives you shape. Might the most fulfilling times be those spent solo at your tasks, literally immersed or not, when you are able to uncover the smallest surprises and unlikely details of some process or operation that in turn exposes your proclivities and prejudices both?”

“He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing”

“It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.”

“What hasty preperations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we’re sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we’ll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.”

“Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?”

“Suffering is the noblest art, the quieter the better.”

“Our tainted world looms within us, every one.”

“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.”

“The truth, finally, is who can tell it.”

“It’s perhaps more laudable to simply keep heading out into the world, than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.”