Top Jess Row Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Jess Row Biography

Jess Row (born 1974 in Washington, D.C.) is an American short story writer and novelist.

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Jess Row Quotes

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

Appreciate, Art, Forms, Impact

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

Baby, Ben, Kings, Later In Life, Music, Parents

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N. W. A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music. "

80S, Beginning, Ice, People, Rap

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

American, Culture, See, Steps

I had observed people whose identity crises around race seemed analogous to other people's identity crises around gender.

Analogous, Identity, Observed, People, Race

Yale's endowment became a metaphor for the kind of training it offered its graduates, namely, how to exploit the global marketplace, and technology, for your own interests, while maintaining a smokescreen of virtuous intent.

Graduates, Marketplace, Technology, Training, Virtuous

Narrative stories are nothing but models of karma and causality - how one thing leads to another. And a lot of narrative fiction is about causality that we don't immediately understand.

Fiction, Karma, Leads, Models, Stories

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

Attitude, Intolerable, Men, People

My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Cities, Involved, Movement, Parent, Parents, Volunteer

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

Expectations, Long, Overcome, Overcoming

Not unlike gender reassignment surgery, someone determines that they are of a different race on the inside and they wish to surgically correct that.

Determines, Different, Race, Surgery, Wish

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

Americans, Blues, Hong, Hong Kong, Kong, Sense

The truth is that an intellectual life is available to almost anyone, almost anywhere, if they work hard enough and are given some kind of access point.

Access, Enough, Hard Work, Intellectual, Kind, Truth

Because of all the cosmetic services like skin whitening and hair bleaching, there is a lot that people can do to change their appearance without having actual surgery. It's quite common in Thailand and Korea and Japan.

Hair, Japan, Korea, Quite, Services

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Approaching, Novels, Oblique, Race, White, Writing

I've spent my entire adult life teaching at colleges of various kinds, all of them very different from Yale, and I have a fairly cynical perspective on what elite institutions - and the privileges they embody - represent in America.

Adult, College, Elite, Fairly, Perspective, Teaching

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements.

Divorce, Drinking, Manliness, Richard, Story, Writing

Prajna is insight into the world. And a lot of that insight has to do with karma and the way karma affects our lives.

Affects, Karma, Prajna, Way, World

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

Instruction, Mfa, People, Program, Programs, Writing

For me, there's a very clear parallel between the practice of insight in Buddhism and what's called prajna - the insight that arrives through meditation.

Buddhism, Meditation, Parallel, Practice

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