Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

When you grow up in an extended family, or in a stable neighborhood with two or three generations of families who live there, you feel seen. Not just the good things you've done, the stuff you put on your resume. You know they've seen you in your dark times, when you've messed up - but they're still there.

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.

In Afghanistan, you don't understand yourself solely as an individual. You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself.

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

Americans want individual freedom and yet they want strong communities. There is some contradiction there.

All people owe their lives to surrounding society.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

My kids are part of the rest of my community and my wider family.

We live in community, and we're created in community. We're created out of the unity of two people, and then we're made into a family. It's just inherent in who we are.

We are all in this together, by ourselves.

I'm a big fan of community, and I think independence is over-rated.

We need to redefine community and find a variety of ways of coming together and helping each other.

I grew up with no money. My kids will grow up with a lot of money and so it's really important to me, and it will always be a part of my parenting, to keep them conscientious and connected socially to other people.

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

There's something about being with a group of people who become like family that must be needed in society.

Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

There is no one subsists by himself alone.

I'm part of a community that holds each other up, and it's been great to be held up too.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

People who volunteer at the recycling center or soup kitchen through a church or neighborhood group can come to feel part of something 'larger.' Such a sense of belonging calls on a different part of a self than the market calls on. The market calls on our sense of self-interest. It focuses us on what we 'get.'

President Obama is casting his lot in the middle of a debate as old as America itself: Are we rugged individualists pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps? Or are we a nation of community, all connected and counting on one another?

I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.

People are not considerate of others. They tend not to consider themselves as all living together, but see themselves only as individuals.