Top 35 Rachel Khong Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Sharing things is how things get started, and not sharing things is how they end.”

— Rachel Khong

2. “The mind tells you what or whom to love, and then you do it, but sometimes the mind plays tricks, and sometimes the mind is the worst.”

— Rachel Khong

3. “Today we went over to your mother’s friend’s house for dinner. We’d asked you to be polite, so you said, “No more, please, it’s horrible thank you.”

— Rachel Khong

4. “Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.”

— Rachel Khong

5. “When I brought it up, months later, Joel said, “What are you talking about?” because he didn’t remember it – he’d forgotten it completely – and it was at that point I realized that I could remember something and he could remember something different and if we built up a store of separate memories, how would that work, and would it be okay? The answer, of course, in the end, was no.”

— Rachel Khong

6. “I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.”

— Rachel Khong

7. “Lately my thing is inventing new yoga poses. The Onion is one. You make yourself very round, then peel yourself, limb by limb.”

— Rachel Khong

8. “What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person – what we felt about that person.”

— Rachel Khong

9. “If I were you is something I’ve never really understood. Why say, “If I were you”? Why say, “If I were you,” when the problem is you’re not me? I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.”

— Rachel Khong

10. “So I switched my major to art history. In the end, I wasn’t the sort of person who yearned to shape a landscape. I wanted only to observe it.”

— Rachel Khong

11. “I used to be very quick to judge the old men who don’t know that when you walk past them on the sidewalk where they’re sweeping leaves, they should stop sweeping. But not it occurs to me that maybe these old men have maladies – diseases that affect their manners – and should be pardoned.”

— Rachel Khong

12. “She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn’t. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age.”

— Rachel Khong

13. “It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.”

— Rachel Khong

14. “A big part of adulthood seemed to be checking email repeatedly.”

— Rachel Khong

15. “Think of all the mice the scientists are studying: all those mice with Alzheimer’s. What do they forget? They forget many things, but they never forget how much they like peanut butter.”

— Rachel Khong

16. “We were told what to want: Propaganda was universal. Especially in this country, where the propaganda was that there was none – we were free. But were we? When we were made to value certain lives more than others; when we were made, relentlessly, to want more? What if I had seen through it? What if I had understood that I already had enough?”

— Rachel Khong

17. “Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.”

— Rachel Khong

18. “Of course she was interrupting. As people we interrupted one another’s lives – that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.”

— Rachel Khong

19. “It was books, the immense volume of them, that opened my eyes to how little we understood about the world we inhabited: a world that appeared ordinary in its dailiness yet contained mysteries upon mysteries, one door opening onto another.”

— Rachel Khong

20. “But most people in America, those who are fed and clothed and housed, can choose what to care about. From your comfortable position you can decide if you want to know about people in Syria or Myanmar, with the flip of a television switch.”

— Rachel Khong

21. “This was what love had always been for me – denying your own reality in order to protect another person.”

— Rachel Khong

22. “How thoughtless we had been, to believe that trees needed to be useful, or that usefulness was even the point.”

— Rachel Khong

23. “Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.”

— Rachel Khong

24. “As a parent, she had sought to do the opposite of what her mother had done – not expecting Nick to resemble her, not burdening him with her expectations. And yet was she any different? Could love between a mother and child be anything less than completely overwhelming?”

— Rachel Khong

25. “I would always feel guilty toward her. Was guilt the right word? I just mean there could never be a righting of the scales. Why did parents perform all these un-repayable acts? Was it because they felt guilty for bringing us here in the first place?”

— Rachel Khong

26. “We never shared those wishes. We were scared that by sharing them, they wouldn’t come true. But now it occurs to me that if we’d divulged them to each other then, we’d be better able to remember them now: we’d have some else to help with half the work of remembering.”

— Rachel Khong

27. “In the act of giving I conceded that I had more than I needed, and someone had far less than they did. It was for no real reason, it wasn’t fair. It shattered the illusion of my own free will – that I had made choices, and those choices had resulted in my life.”

— Rachel Khong

28. “You repeated about how nice the day was, either because you really wanted me to know it or because you’d forgotten you already mentioned it, but all of a sudden, it didn’t matter what you remembered or didn’t, and the remembering – it occurred to me – was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the day was nice – was what it was.”

— Rachel Khong

29. “I’d thought transporting me to another setting was all that was needed to render me normal. I’d failed to consider that I might be the same person here.”

— Rachel Khong

30. “The mother wore an expression of exhaustion that I remembered so well. She had surrendered: inviting the discomfort, not refusing it. Pain was easier to tolerate when you didn’t resist it.”

— Rachel Khong

31. “You cast a look of concern at the colander of cauliflower. “No more crucified vegetables,” you said. “But they died for you, Dad.”

— Rachel Khong

32. “Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.”

— Rachel Khong

33. “I wanted to tell Betty’s granddaughter that it wasn’t too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions – that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”

— Rachel Khong

34. “It doesn’t matter who remembers what, I guess, so long as somebody remembers something.”

— Rachel Khong

35. “Linus makes us thermoses of coffee in the morning and we take them to the beach, where the sky is gray and the ocean is gray and it feels like being wrapped in a newspaper.”

— Rachel Khong