Top 50 Jenny Zhang Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Jenny Zhang Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

When it comes to love, maturity often gets a bad rap -

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
I’m surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off.
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
While I was growing up in Flushing, Queens, we socialized exclusively with other Chinese immigrants. I was forbidden to make contact with nonapproved, non-Chinese peers outside school. That was fine with 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
I’m drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.
Jenny Zhang
I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for ‘Power Rangers.’
Jenny Zhang
I often wonder if my being a fairly small Asian woman with a high-pitched quietish voice plays a role in how often men feel entitled to come up to me and tell me, ‘You have this doll act,’ or whatever.
Jenny Zhang
I lived so completely in my mind – a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!
Jenny Zhang
Does self-acceptance ultimately require another person, or is there a kind of love that does not dabble in the dream of a perfect twinship?
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
Karaoke was my family’s happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate – and above all there was song.
Jenny Zhang
Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me – an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American – there were limits.
Jenny Zhang
Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, who founded Lenny Books together, also happen to have exquisite reading tastes – from obscure small press poetry chapbook to dishy memoirs to literary novels – and so it’s a real honor that they’ve chosen to announce their imprint with my stories.
Jenny Zhang
Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I’m not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I’m telling very specific stories.
Jenny Zhang
Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke.
Jenny Zhang
I hadn’t ever worked with an ‘editor’ until I was 26 – although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.
Jenny Zhang
In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.
Jenny Zhang
Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person’s worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother’s values – these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.
Jenny Zhang
Michael Derrick Hudson is not the first person to slip into the identity of a person of color to give himself some perceived advantage. He can slip back into his life and not walk around in this world as a person of color who endures racism.
Jenny Zhang
It’s okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It’s just a performance.
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 grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.
Jenny Zhang
‘Alphabet’ by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It’s a book-length abecedarian poem. It’s an activist text but also a portal to wonder.
Jenny Zhang
I think being a writer is being heavily attuned to the absolute absurdity of things you take for granted, and I think that having actual parents who lived through the Cultural Revolution who are also interested in literature, they’re also very attuned to those moments.
Jenny Zhang
Rage can be so common it turns ambient.
Jenny Zhang
Our culture is bloodthirsty for stories about women in pain; we hunger for women to expose their traumas and to be rescued by the love of a good man.
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
The ‘New York Times’ is not reviewing books by non-white people.
Jenny Zhang
Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.
Jenny Zhang
I wish it wasn’t so natural for me to dwell on the past.
Jenny Zhang
Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell thi

Growing up, I had a face that people wanted to tell things to, and I grew up with adults who had so much to say. They had lived through decades of unbelievable poverty, starvation, political upheaval, chaos.
Jenny Zhang
I’d behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk’s closet.
Jenny Zhang
Early in my life, without any supporting evidence, I fretted over what I believed was my fate: accidentally becoming an international pop star. The pages of my diary were filled with hypothetical ethical dilemmas.
Jenny Zhang
My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.
Jenny Zhang
One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won’t succeed.
Jenny Zhang
Coming out of the closet doesn’t always mean liberation.
Jenny Zhang
If you were to make a quick judgment call on my intelligence and articulation when I first moved to the U.S. based on my speaking skills, it would be very low.
Jenny Zhang
I’m always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit.
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
That’s what people expect: They don’t want to read a slight novel. People don’t want to waste their time on anything less than ‘great.’
Jenny Zhang
We’re not the best about knowing what’s the most interesting about ourselves.
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
Once I decided I was happy with something, I’d try to send it off into the world, and either someone would want it exactly as it was, or it would remain in my notebook/laptop, and no one would ever see it. This is probably why I didn’t work with an editor until I was 26. The solipsism!
Jenny Zhang
Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror – robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.
Jenny Zhang
Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It’s not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.
Jenny Zhang
People who have very devastating lives sometimes have the most wild, avant-garde humor. It’s like when you’ve seen it all and been through it all, nothing is off-limits in a way.
Jenny Zhang
Visibility doesn’t always equal freedom.
Jenny Zhang
From its very inception, Lenny Letter set out to create a supportive, positive, inclusive space on the Internet that does not shy away from complexity and nuance.
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