Jenny Zhang Quotes

Jenny Zhang

Profession : Actress

Birth : June 22, 1987

My privileged upbringing and education and linguistic fluency gave me such proximity to whiteness that it stung all the more to still find myself outside of it. My mother, on the other hand, not only accepted that she would always be an outsider in this country but also believed it to be a finer fate and home than any other she could have had.

Jenny Zhang

When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap - second love is boring; it's practical. It's what our parents feel for each other.

Jenny Zhang

Whenever I passed by a Chinese restaurant in a car, I'd joke to my friends, 'Oh yeah, my uncle owns that place.'

Jenny Zhang

For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.

Jenny Zhang

I like to keep a book underneath the pillow that I'm not sleeping on so I can reach over and grab it when I wake up. I don't always do that, but I like to. I try to make sure it's a book and not my laptop. I also try not to get too excited about who might've been trying to contact me while I was asleep.

Jenny Zhang

It's like a weird mindset to wake up and want to be wanted. Like, I want to be wanted so much already... and I'm so greedy for other people's desire that I have to really force myself to have some shame about it and some control, neither of which come easily to me.

Jenny Zhang

We lived in one of those half-basement apartments, and on our first night of being in America, someone reached through the grate that protects the window and stole our laundry detergent - which wasn't a big deal, but it felt symbolic when I heard about it later as an adult.

Jenny Zhang

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.

Jenny Zhang

When I was an undergrad at Stanford, there was a girl named Jennie Kim who worked for the school newspaper. Sometimes people would come up to me and talk to me about articles she had written. 'That one on getting a Brazilian was hilarious', some guy said, high-fiving me.

Jenny Zhang

I know I am not the first woman to ask this, but how can I be both damaged and loveable? How do I become the protagonist of a story?

Jenny Zhang

As a child, I would go days without speaking, and then suddenly I would scream until everyone was looking at me.

Jenny Zhang

The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'

Jenny Zhang

I just submitted what I had to the 'Octopus Books' contest open reading period, and they said they wanted to publish my poetry book. Then I started to publish more and more poetry because people would ask me to do readings or ask me submit something for their journal.

Jenny Zhang

Poetry was my dirty little secret when I was a fiction writer at Iowa, and then fiction became my dirty little secret when I started writing more poetry and working for 'Rookie'.

Jenny Zhang

With nonfiction, I had to learn how to be a clear communicator, but it was also a relief to be able to articulate some of my political ideas and beliefs. I also try to do that in my fiction, but I'm more interested in asking questions that lead to more questions, mysteries that lead to more mysteries, rather than immediate answers and solutions.

Jenny Zhang

Sometimes I worry that people who read my fiction think that I am making some kind of thesis statement.

Jenny Zhang

It's very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.

Jenny Zhang

I wish it wasn't so natural for me to dwell on the past.

Jenny Zhang

As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.

Jenny Zhang

I'm always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.

Jenny Zhang