Sour Heart Quotes

“Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about 'family' we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“It was my mother who tucked him in and told him that there exists a sort of love in the world that only survives as long as no one ever speaks of it, and that was why he would never have to worry because my grandmother was never going to be the kind of mother who held her children in her arms and told them how smart and beautiful and talented they were. She was only going to scold them, make them feel diminutive, make them feel like they were never good enough, make them know this world wouldn't be kind to them. She wasn't going to let someone else be better than her at making her children feel pain or scare them more than she could, and that to her, that was a form of protection. That's how we will be with our own children, my mother was proud to realize. Because we'll learn from our mother who learned from her mother before her and all the mothers before them.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“It wasn't fair I had to be me for as long as I lived while other people got to be other people.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“These kids have death wishes. It's always the ones born with the right to live who want to die. These people have never been forced to suffer and that's why they seek it voluntarily.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“From that point on, I would refer to him as "your uncle" and he would mostly refer to me as "your aunt" and it would take a longtime for our children to even understand that we were siblings first.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Why did my mother, a grown woman, get to talk like all her hopes and dreams had been shat on, kicked, and set on fire, all the while pushing me, a mere girl, a child, to do better, to accomplish more, to face down all the odds and become a legend? When was I supposed to complain the way they did? To be validated the way they validated each other?”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Another scar that faded enough to be just another mark we carried.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again. Mememememememe.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“My cousin and I were beginning to understand why our grandmother cried so often, and how there were so few options for coping with the reappearances and disappearances that we would both continue to make in each other's lives.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I had prayed for this kind of soft joy, this kind of contentment, a day like this followed by more days like this, and finally having it was like being born, only instead of not remembering what it was like to be born, I was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don’t remember what it was like to be born—because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. To be present for your own birth was suicide. To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. They had to occur together and there was no prayer for what I knew in my flaky soul—that there was no way to escape the fear. It would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. Still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Back when my parents and I lived in Bushwick in a building sandwiched between a drug house and another drug house, the only difference being that the dealers in the one drug house were also the users and so more unpredictable, and in the other the dealers were never the users and so more shrewd – back in those days, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment so subpar that we woke up with flattened cockroaches in our bedsheets, sometimes three or four stuck on our elbows, and once I found fourteen of them pressed to my calves, and there was no beauty in shaking them off, though we strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I picked out the rest of the burnt strands, and the two of us ate them from my cupped hand while we sat on the couch, my arm around him and his feet wiggling like noodles in boiling water, our eyes staring straight ahead, as if the opening credits were coming on.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“The more my father went on about how much they hated us, the more I started to suspect maybe he was the one who hated us.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“It was better to do something right the second time around than to get away with doing it wrong the first time.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Her children and her children's children were children forever - that was how she planned on becoming God and dragging us into her eternity.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I was old enough to understand how one of trauma's many possible effects was to make the traumatized person insufferable, how my grandmother's unwillingness to be a victim was both pathetic and impressive and made her deserving of at least some compassion, but fuck, why did she have to be so greedy for it?”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“All of her was laid bare now - I saw her. She was just a little old woman, raised in a country without education or any of the basic things she had given my mother and my mother's siblings, someone who'd been told as a young girl that women were put on this earth to give birth and rear children and not be a burden in any way but live as servants lived, productively, without fatigue or requirements of their own yet had been resourceful and clever enough to come up through the feminist movement that Mao had devised to get women out of the house and into fields and factories, someone who had been given more power than any of the women in her lineage, who alluded to all the people she "saved" but never mentioned the people she turned in during the Cultural Revolution, someone whose hearing loss fed right into her fears of becoming useless, becoming someone others no longer bothered to address, and to counter those fears, she had to adopt a confidence that was embarrassing to witness, she had to maintain an opinion of herself so excessively high that it bordered on delusional.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Next year my brother will e in high school and when I was in high school, I had a kid brother who grabbed my leg and walked with it in his arms through our house when it was cold, sat on my shoulders when it was hot to get closer to the ceiling fan, and slept in my bed when he missed me, which was all the time.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“But I'm here, I said to him in my head. I'm here, Eddie. "What if I needed you to know I'm here?" I said in the smallest voice I had.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“There was a version of you that was too selfish and there was one where you weren't selfish enough and you were constantly waking up from one into the other and that was why you weren't sure if you were looking down at yourself or you were looking up at yourself and which one was the real you and which was the dream? There was no telling.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“I had never been a worse adult than when I was still a kid.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Maybe we would grow apart, he would develop a personality that I would know nothing about, we would start our families, have children of our own, and there would come a point when in thinking about "family" we would think of the ones we made, not the ones we were from.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Surely there was someplace where it was safe, where who you thought you were matched up with how others treated you, where there was forgiveness in great abundance, never to be depleted, and as far as I knew, the first step to getting there was to have a boy who loved you and only you.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even themselves, or at least not the selves they once were that other people still had to be.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even themselves, or at least not the selves they once were that other people still had to be,”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities were negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us--me and my brother--and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides "daughter" or "sister." It turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“They were a sign of patronage, a sign of having so much money that it had to be squandered on objects with no purpose except to be beautiful or interesting.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart

“Didn't it bother him that he was teaching his students poetry when he was certain it wouldn't make a difference in how their lives turned out? Didn't it bother him to be so sure that it was futile to even try? And what about us? What standards did we have? Weren't our fates sealed as well? What was I ever going to become? What stopped other people from looking at us and pitying us, how we didn't see the pointlessness in working so many jobs, moving from one shit place to another and scrimping on pennies, how we couldn't face the reality of our situation: that non of this was leading up to anywhere that was any different from where we had just been.”
― Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart