novelists-from-san-francisco

"For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture. To be an artist was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women."

"I believe that freedom must be accompanied by a sense of responsibility. If I can he considered famous because I have succeeded in my life goals, which were different from most other Chinese Americans, I achieved because of my unique combination : American freedom of choice, Chinese discipline in responsibility, my integrity, and willingness to work."

"But whether in the majority or the minority, young people will be growing up to find new values and activities different from their parents'. You may find that your meaning in life is so different because of your new experiences; you decide to break from your parents' demands. Each person must make his/her decision between his newly found values and his parents' established formula. Each must carefully strike a balance. Be considerate of your parents, for they nurtured you and think they know best. If you must break from them, do so as gently as you can."

"Today's critics are using their yardstick of today to judge a past they did not know."

"If I only thought in the traditional way Chinese expect young people to think, I would never have dared to write my story. Because American studies developed my individual critical thinking, I gained an objective point of view. But because of my love of Chinese culture, my point of view is always sensitive to my heritage. This heritage values males absolutely above their consideration of females. I was acutely aware of this injustice every day I was in my parents' home. Only after maturity did I recognize that my parents were observing values of Imperial China, which they left a hundred years ago. They knew no other standards."

"At Mills College, I felt favorable interest in me because I represented the Chinese culture to fellow students and my teachers. I also wrote about being informed upon graduation that there would be prejudice against employing me in the business world. And it was awareness of prejudice that motivated me to write my book. I feel that prejudice springs from ignorance. So I wrote Fifth Chinese Daughter as one personal effort to create understanding."

"I did pottery well because of the disciplined work habits instilled by my parents. Pottery as it was taught to me at that time required a student to know clay compositions , glaze chemistry and proportions of mineral oxides, the ability to throw pottery on the wheel, then trim and decorate it, the ability to apply glazes, to stack and unstack a kiln, the ability to tend to firing it to maturity-all this by myself."

"So I always tried my best, but I chose a path different from my parents' Chinese expectations. My parents wanted me to marry a rich and educated man from their ancestral village. Not one of my high school girl classmates went on to college. But marriage was not the satisfying fulfillment that I desired for life. Neither was being famous part of my plan. I just wanted to follow where my passion led me. As long as I was not breaking the law, I was willing to depart from cultural norms in my drive for self-determination."

"My parents never complimented me; they never even said, "Thank you." If I reported any accomplishment to them, they would say disapprovingly, "If a flower is fragrant, people would naturally know it." Instead, I was constantly reminded to do my best to bring credit to my family and the name of "Wong". A disgraceful deed would downgrade my family, not just myself."

"The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean. My God, the world can be beautiful."

"“I want you to save the world, Mr. Newton.” Newton’s smile did not change, and his reply was immediate. “Is it worth saving, Nathan?”"

"Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere."

"Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”"

"It is the greatest achievement of my life. Yes, I have used that word: a great achievement. My learning to read was an achievement. Nobody knows that but me."

"“You know,” she said, “they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word ‘serve’ it sounds like ‘control.’ My father—Simon—called it ‘politician talk.’”"

"“What is it exactly that you do with a book?” “You read it.” “Oh,” she said. And then, “What does read mean?” I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”"

"I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many."

"All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things."

"Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods."

"They had told us how important courts were for protecting our sacred rights to Privacy and Individuality, and how helpful a judge could be, but you somehow got the idea that it was a good idea to stay away from courts altogether."

"Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count."

"Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read. Why can no one read? What happened?"

"Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”"

"I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living."

"“I’m like everybody else. This kind of living ain’t much better than being dead.” He laughed again, shaking his head from side to side. “And it ain’t much better on the outside, to tell the truth. No real work to do, except the same kind of crap you do in here. At the Worker Dormitories they told us, ‘Labor fulfills.’ Horseshit.”"

"Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real."

"We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”"

"Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind."

"What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?"

"When literacy died, so had history."

"It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium."

"The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?” I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”"

"“Would you show me how to make an omelette?” She looked shocked, and said nothing. Then from the sink the other woman’s voice said, “Men don’t cook.” The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, “This man is different, Mary. He’s a Reader.”"

"I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been."

"I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.” The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabelle to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again."

"But although I had watched television in the same way many times in my life before, I found I could no longer watch it and not think. “Give yourself to the Screen,” they had taught us. It was as basic as “Don’t ask; relax.” But I could no longer give myself to it. I no longer wanted to keep my mind silent, or use it as a vehicle for disconnected pleasure; I wanted to read, and think, and talk."

"I have read over a hundred books. And I have played, over and over, recordings of the symphonies of Mozart and Brahms and Prokofiev and Beethoven, and chamber music, and operettas, and various musical works by Bach and Sibelius and Dolly Parton and Palestrina and Lennon. This music sometimes, even more than the books, enlarges my sense of the past."

"And then I began to feel it, the whole enormous scope of it, in what had begun in some dark antiquity of trees and caves and the plains of Africa; of human life, erect and ape-like, spreading itself everywhere and building first its idols and then its cities. And then dwindling to a drugged trace, a remnant, because of a failed machine. A tiny part of a failed machine. And a more-than-human robot that would not try to repair it."

"Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment."

"I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men."

"I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy. This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word."

"Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat."

"“Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?” “No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.” “Oh,” I said. “It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”"

"One of my books says that at times men have worshiped the ocean as a god. I can understand that easily. Yes. But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either."

"My God, the things I have read and learned since I left Ohio! And they have changed me so much I hardly recognize myself. Just knowing that there has been a past to human life and getting a slight sense of what that past was like have altered my mind and my behavior beyond recognition."

"I had seen talking films as a graduate student, along with the handful of others who were interested in such things. But the films—The Magnificent Obsession, Dracula Strikes, The Sound of Music—had only seemed to be “mind-blowing.” They were merely another, more esoteric way of manipulating one’s mental states for the sake of pleasure and inwardness. It would never have occurred to me then, in my illiterate and brainwashed state, to observe such films as a means of learning something valuable about the past."

"But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable."

"He was, if not happy, too busy to be unhappy."

"Are you from Venus? Jupiter? Philadelphia?"

"He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are."