Jess Row Quotes

• Black culture is very difficult to explain to people who don't have any direct contact with it.

  Jess Row

  People, Black, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Attitude, Men, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Writing, Race, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Only when you leave do you appreciate what binds American people and our cultural experience together.

  Jess Row

  People, Appreciate, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Karma, World, Way

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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."

  Jess Row

  Rap, Ice, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

  Jess Row

  Rocks, Indie Rock, Hip Hop

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Drinking, Character, Divorce

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Hair, Japan, Korea

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's an enormous difference between normative white masculinity and normative black masculinity.

  Jess Row

  White, Differences, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I was raised with opera and very white-bread folk music like The Kingston Trio. That was about as daring as it got. So when I discovered hip-hop as a teenager, at first it made no sense to me at all.

  Jess Row

  Teenager, White, Hip Hop

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Hard Work, Intellectual, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Culture, Steps

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Race, People, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Buddhism, Practice, Meditation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Art, Impact, Appreciate

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Karma, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Hong Kong has been the place where the memory of Tiananmen Square lives on; Hong Kong people have become more and more committed in their resistance to authoritarian government, and also, not surprisingly, committed to safeguarding their culture and heritage as something distinct and worth preserving.

  Jess Row

  Memories, Squares, Government

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Technology, Training, Graduates

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jess Row

  Teaching, College, Perspective

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

  Jess Row

  Identity, Debate, Complicated

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There is something very quiet and reserved and pessimistic about Obama's temperament that is deeply un-American. There are those people who claim, "Oh, he wasn't born here" - all that is nonsense.

  Jess Row

  People, Pessimistic, Quiet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

  Jess Row

  Past, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.

  Jess Row

  Men, Position Of Power, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jess Row

  Hong Kong

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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