Asian American Quotations

This an area on the Asian American Cybernauts website that I'd like to try out. I'm sure we've all heard memorable lines spoken by various famous people... "I have a dream". But how many quotes can you recite from Asian American people?

I personally thought about this for a while, and couldn't think of very many. Yet, I know that ordinary Asian Americans speak out every day. It certainly doesn't mean that Asian Americans aren't saying things that matter, but perhaps they are not given the same mainstream public attention, or no one is keeping track of them.

Anyway, I'd like to see what favorite quotations by Asian Americans Internet users might have. If you have an inspirational or thoughful Asian American quote, please e-mail them to me at ebihara@janet.org, or add them to the guestbook. These will be greatly appreciated, since there isn't much here right now. The quotes can be from any Asian American person -- big or small, it doesn't matter, as long as they "say something". Please include the source of the quote, if possible, and I'll try to add them onto this page.

Thank you!


[ By the way, if by any chance you're an aspiring or established Asian Pacific American writer, you might consider becoming a member of the online Asian Pacific American Writers (APAW) Group.]



I am here to speak. Say the words. Her nearness has delivered me to this moment, an ever-lengthening moment between her breaths, that I might finally speak the words turning inward, for the first time, in my own beginning and lonely language: Do not be afraid. It is all right, so do not be afraid. You are not really alone. You may die, but you will have been heard. Keep speaking -- it is real. You have a voice.

--Chang-rae Lee, The Faintest Echo of our Language

This is a historic moment for Asian Americans because for the first time we're all united.

-- Dr. Marisa Chuang, American Citizens for Justice, after the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit

Make your life count -- and the world will be a better place because you tried.

-- Ellison Onizuka, Astronaut, Message to Konawaena High School, 1980


Why does BC stand for Before Christ? Why is it not Before Confucius?

-- Joe Fong

After all these years of struggle, it's coming into the wholeness of life, the wholeness of yourself again. And you realize that you had nothing to learn -- that you had it all from the very beginning. Once you make good in one thing, all else will follow.

--Mine Okubo, Japanese American artist

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

--Maxine Hong Kingston, Writer, 1977

The bridge of their Enterprise, however, may now have a Klingon on board as the symbol of galactic coexistence, but at least a third of the population of our world and certainly the twenty-fourth century was absent. There were no Asians on their bridge.

--George Takei, Mr. Sulu, writing about the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

There is a silence that cannot speak.
There is a silence that will not speak.
Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.

--Joy Kogawa, Obasan

Reading first the odd-numbered pages, and then the even, he read out loud, while all one hundred rooms of the house of the seed echoed with the sound of a hand reading.

--Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

--Yuri Kochiyama


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