Harvard University Alumni

"Old like her father was old, a shaggy shambling old, an old where you'd lost the order of things and felt so sad that you simply had to embrace the loss, reassuring yourself with the lie that you hadn't really wanted all that order to begin with."

"They were not kings. The empire was a frikkin sham. They were colonialists, and for that you only need brute force – nothing to boast of when you have it. Power’s just an accident that depends on the weakness of others."

"Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly - weeping was just what she did now, who she was - Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied"

"…partly because I’m perceived as black…the idea I could look at my mother and say to her that I’m not black makes no sense. To me, blackness is just part of what the family is."

"I probably seem quite at ease now saying I’m mixed race, I’m black, I’m Zambian, but for a while that was quite torturous, quite angsty. As a young woman I wasn’t very tender or nice to myself…Now I’m older, I’m much more able to be tender and kind to the younger me that I see in the book."

"…It's a very interesting position to be in as an immigrant to the United States - now a citizen - who grew up in a country where the word immigrant meant people who were coming into Zambia, not people who were leaving, fleeing as refugees to go to the West…"

"It has always been hard to measure poverty, because poverty is as much a state of mind as a condition of material well-being. Still, we seem to have made a bad situation worse."

"I think there was an impulse in me to write women as central to the text. Part of that is my own limitations as a writer: being able to delineate the varieties of female experience is clearly easier for someone who’s lived as a woman, and projecting myself into male characters is harder for me. It’s something I have to really work on…"

"The Civil Rights Movement in the US was all about logjams and blockades. Martin Luther King is the one who said “a riot is the language of the unheard”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too."

"Equality!’ he cried. ‘You see? Only from level ground can you grow new crops. The war taught me that all men are equal before death, black and white. And yesterday,’ he shrugged, ‘Miss Matha showed me that this equality thing probably includes the females, too."

"...all of them had tried to forget it. They did not talk about it; they never mentioned it. But it lingered, like a bad smell. It had suffused them so deeply it could never wash out. (chapter six, p124)"

"Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say. (p164)"

"People decide what you're like before they even get to know you” (p193)"

"Every time she kissed him, every time he opened his arms and she crawled into them, felt like a miracle. Coming to her made him feel perfectly welcomed, perfectly at home, as he had never in his life felt before. (p40)"

"Here is a prayer: As you gain power, may you never forget what it’s like to not have power."

"As a former debater, I think that the “debate” mentality is a huge part of the problems in our public discourse. Debate—which many aspiring lawyers do in school—teaches you to treat everything like an academic thought experiment, rather than real issues that affect actual humans."

"It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales. (p271)"

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast. (first lines)"

"Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says upfront, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel that it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know that the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers in them. Every event, every character, must be made real by the author’s skill. It is a tricky balancing act, because the fiction writer aims for simultaneous belief and disbelief: a belief in the essential trueness of this world—that these people could exist, that these events could have happened—with a full consciousness of their falsehood…fiction’s role is essentially persuasive. It forces you to start from a position of disbelief by announcing its own fictitiousness. Then it transforms you into the literary equivalent of a sinner seeing the light, a prodigal son whose faith is stronger for having doubted and been redeemed. You don’t question a memoir; you believe it’s true when you pick it up. But you are told from the beginning that fiction is untrue. It depends on its own power to convince you in spite of this knowledge, and that belief, when it comes, is a complete transformation. And this is why we need fiction."

"Fiction says, I believe that this could happen. It is prospective, focused on possibilities. It opens us to the possible, the hypothetical, rather than binding us to the actual. And this, more than anything, is why true stories alone aren’t enough, why we should recognize fiction and read it, why fiction is valuable. Without fiction, we might end up like the woman on the bus, unable to muster interest in anything that isn’t a True Story, that doesn’t come with shocking photographs. We would have no what ifs, only what dids. We would have nothing but the actual. And if we believe only in the actual, how small our lives would be, how limited and mean our humanity, to demand proof before we believe or conceive of suffering, loss, or strangeness."

"they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure. (p271)"

"one way to think of privilege is who’s allowed to make mistakes."

"Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it. (p273)"

"In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break. (p283)"

"To those out on their own paths, setting little fires"

"Everyone on Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle,the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough--or, depending which side you are on, May Ling Chow--and now, at last, there was something new and sensational to discuss. (chapter 1 first lines)"

"I don't know that art by itself is enough to sort of magically change people's minds, but what I hope is that if it can get people questioning and thinking and connecting with other people, that might be something that will get them to take action. I think art can touch us emotionally sometimes. It kind of blindsides us, but in a good way. And when you sit with those feelings, that might be one of the things that pushes you in the right direction. (2022)"

"(should be on every college syllabus:) Something by a non-white writer, something by a queer writer, and something by a non-American writer. For starters. (2022)"

"I started tweeting more about social issues that were close to me—Asian American representation, LGBTQ rights, and compassion—as I started to get more well-known. It just seemed to me that if people were listening, I owed it to others to try and speak about something that mattered, and call attention to things that were getting overlooked. You could say I became much more political with the advent of the 2016 election, when the stakes became much higher for me as a woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants. But really I’ve always been political, because when you’re in any marginalized group, your existence is politicized for you, whether you like it or not. (2017)"

"I think even if I did try to write something that had nothing to do with women or race, which are two pretty broad topics, I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t think there’s a way that I could write a buddy cop drama, or something really far from anything I’ve written, that didn’t have pieces of race and gender. Those are parts of the world we live in, and they are things I think about. It all comes into the voice of your writing, and you can’t write about someone else’s voice. You can only write in your own."

"Your experience has so much to do with how you view difference and how you approach being in the world. For example, in the grocery store, if someone comes down the aisle, I always preemptively move to the side—I’ve had many experiences where I get a glare or a huffy scolding or even a racial slur if the person feels I’m in the way. My parents did the same; years of experience as part of a racial minority taught them that to be noticed often means being harassed, so they try to avoid attention of any kind. On the other hand my husband, who is white, continues whatever he’s doing. His reasoning is ‘If I’m in the way, they’ll just ask me to move,’ and he’s right. The world treats him differently, so he sees it very differently."

"It’s tricky to write about your hometown the same way it’s tricky to write about your family: sometimes you are so close that you can’t see them properly. And it’s hard to be emotionally honest, as well. I loved—and love—Shaker Heights, so I want to portray it lovingly. At the same time, it has its faults like any community, and I wanted to try and be clear-eyed about that. (2017)"

"She wondered if they'd ever get back to normal, if things would ever be the same between them. Sex changed things, she realized-not just between you and the other person, but between you and everyone. (chapter 19 p304)"

"All up and down the street the houses looked like any others—but inside them were people who might be happy, or taking refuge, or steeling themselves to go out into the world, searching for something better. So many lives she would never know about, unfolding behind those doors. (Chapter 20, p335)"

"When a book is explicitly about how marginalized culture and dominant culture interact, it’s much harder to stay detached and voyeuristic. If you’re white, for instance, you may end up asking yourself hard questions: “What do I think about how these white characters—who resemble me—behave? Do I act this way? What’s my place in the system?” You’re asked to think in terms of the larger picture, and you can’t pretend that a marginalized group’s experience is totally separate and other from yours—because, in fact, it isn’t."

"I have an interest in the outsider…In fiction you’re not often writing about the typical, you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour … another part comes from my personality: I’m an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody."

"the problem with rules...was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on. (chapter 16, p269)"

"He felt as if he’d dived into a deep, clear lake and discovered it was a shallow, knee-deep pond. What did you do? Well, you stood up. You rinsed your mud-caked knees and pulled your feet out of the muck. And you were more cautious after that. You knew, from then on, that the world was a smaller place than you’d expected. (Chapter 17, p275)"

"“Sometimes, just when you think everything’s gone, you find a way...Like after a prairie fire...It seems like the end of the world. The earth is all scorched and black and everything green is gone. But after the burning, the soil is richer, and new things can grow....People are like that, too, you know. They start over. They find a way.” (Chapter 18, p295)"

"words...carry these layers of stories with them, inside them, and...they're always changing. (2022)"

"At that moment [he] had a sudden clear understanding of what had already happened that morning: his life had been divided into a before and an after, and he would always be comparing the two. (chapter 2 p21)"

"“Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to.” (Chapter 4, p42)"

"When she asked Mia how she knew which images to put together, Mia shook her head. "I don't," she said. "This-this is how I figure out what I think...I don't have a plan, I'm afraid," she said..."But then, no one really does, no matter what they say." (Chapter 8, p91)"

"The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art. (p99)"

"ANGER IS FEAR’S BODYGUARD, a poster in the hospital had read (Chapter 9, p110)"

"To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again. (Chapter 9, p122)"

"Everything, she noticed, seemed capable of transmogrification. Even the two boulders in the backyard sometimes turned to silver in the early morning sunlight. In the books she read, every stream might be a river god, every tree a dryad in disguise, every old woman a powerful fairy, every pebble an enchanted soul. Anything had the potential to transform, and this, to her, seemed the true meaning of art. (chapter 13 p188)"

"“Most of the time, everyone deserves more than one chance. We all do things we regret now and then. You just have to carry them with you.” (chapter 15 p250)"

"It came, over and over, down to this: What made someone a mother? Was it biology alone, or was it love? (Chapter 16, p258)"

"His man-loving identity ... apparently derived from what appears to be a fusion of the Whitmanesque concept of "manly," "comradely" love with a Greek model of homosexuality in which an older man forms a "noble friendship" with a younger man. ... Locke displayed sexual interest in young men who were apparently not gay-identified. Several of his correspondents came to develop a positive identity as men-loving men. As one man wrote, his introduction to Locke's particular model of same-sex love, which usually occurred via Locke's suggestion of a canon of works that discuss the topic of male same-sex unions sympathetically, made him feel as though he had "awakened from a long sleep": "It opened a bright beautiful way for me, one that was natural and wholesome." Along with a man-loving identity, Locke introduced his correspondents to a specific gay discourse. Looking that the coded terms figuring prominently in this discourse, such as "spiritual affinity," "perfect friendship," and "stimulating camaraderie," it can be recognized that they denote honor, masculinity, and depth. Locke thus opened up to these same-sex-interested men a gay identity without regard for contemporary dominant views linking homosexuality to degeneracy, sickness, or gender inversion."