Top 50 Weike Wang Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You must love chemistry even when it is not working. You must love chemistry unconditionally.”

— Weike Wang

2. “In spoken Chinese, everything is gender neutral. There is no she or he. The more I think about this now, the more I like this about the language. Man or woman? Does it matter? A person.”

— Weike Wang

3. “An atom is mostly made up of empty space. If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world’s human population could fit inside a sugar cube.”

— Weike Wang

4. “A Chinese proverb: Outside of sky there is sky, outside of people there are people. It is the idea of infinity and also that there will always be someone better than you.”

— Weike Wang

5. “A Chinese proverb predicts that for every man with great skill, there is a woman with great beauty. In ancient China, there are four great beauties: The first so beautiful that when fish see her reflection they forget to swim and sink. The second so beautiful that birds forget how to fly and fall. The third so beautiful that the moon refuses to shine. The fourth so beautiful that flowers refuse to bloom. I find it interesting how often beauty is shown to make the objects around it feel worse.”

— Weike Wang

6. “In a letter to his daughter, Einstein wrote that love is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will. He posited to be the universal force scientists have overlooked.”

— Weike Wang

7. “A proverb: My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”

— Weike Wang

8. “I did say that I would follow him to space and that offer stills stands. But I did not say Ohio.”

— Weike Wang

9. “In the mind of a scientist, beauty is simplicity. The most elegant experiment is the one that takes no time to set up and gives the answer to every question.”

— Weike Wang

10. “I am certain that Eric will get the job. His career path is very straight, like that of an arrow to its target. If I were to draw my path out, it would look like a gas particle flying around in space.”

— Weike Wang

11. “As a child, I get new clothes so rarely that when I do, I put off wearing them. It then happens that when the big day comes, the clothes no longer fit.”

— Weike Wang

12. “Why does she deserve this kind of loyalty? She doesn’t. But she does because she is my mother.”

— Weike Wang

13. “But, I tell myself, Weight is just an artifact of gravity. If this were a jazz club on the moon, I would weigh less.”

— Weike Wang

14. “If she has cried, she has not done so in front of me. She has done so in the shower where it is hard to tell.”

— Weike Wang

15. “Most people feel that beauty is not the face but the heart or the soul or the mind – any place that human eye cannot penetrate is where beauty will hide.”

— Weike Wang

16. “Eric has said that I carry close to my chest a ball of barbed wire that I sometimes throw at other people.”

— Weike Wang

17. “I don’t remember ever seeing my parents hold hands, or hug, or kiss. I wonder if this is why when I hear affectionate words, I want to jump off tall buildings despite a crippling fear of heights.”

— Weike Wang

18. “When i get into the best college in America, he is cutting radishes for dinner. I have just found out ten minutes ago. I am elated. He puts down the knife to shake my hand and then goes back to cutting radishes.”

— Weike Wang

19. “My mother has a theory about hair. It is that the longer the hair grows, the dumber a person becomes. She warns that too much hair will suck nutrients away from the head and leave it empty.”

— Weike Wang

20. “In Chinese, there is another phrase about love. It is not used for passionate love but the love between family members. In translation, it means I hurt for you.”

— Weike Wang

21. “Attributing feelings to inanimate things is probably a symptom of only-child-ness. Who else to talk to when the parents fight except walls and banisters and things?”

— Weike Wang

22. “A hallmark of science is setting out to discover one thing and then discovering something else.”

— Weike Wang

23. “An ideal world: money falls from the sky and into my lap for each word that I write. A one-dollar flat rate. A twenty for a real zinger.”

— Weike Wang

24. “Play with your dolls for not more than half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a millisecond. If you learned math as fast as you ran outside to play, then you might be a genius. But you do not and you are not. You’re a hole where knowledge goes to sleep.”

— Weike Wang

25. “Don’t just break it off for the sake of it. Don’t do something drastic just to prove a point.”

— Weike Wang

26. “Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one. Not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

— Weike Wang

27. “The goal of a science PhD is to have an original idea. Those who cannot are often called technicians. A technician is able to follow a protocol but not able to think beyond it. The best PhD students make the jump from technician to scientist in less than a few years. The worst never make that jump. Some advisors realize this early on and advise these students to leave science soon. Other advisors allow them to reach that point themselves.”

— Weike Wang

28. “But it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon.”

— Weike Wang

29. “These words come back to me: you cannot live your life for them. Eventually they will die. I hope they never die because once they do, I will be alone.”

— Weike Wang

30. “All comedies end in marriage. All tragedies end in death. But what about everything else in between? Life happens in the middle, I heard someone very smart say.”

— Weike Wang

31. “China is twelve hours ahead, she tells me. It is always in the future.”

— Weike Wang

32. “Fear of following the other person despite that person being good and reasonable and kind? What phobia is that? Stupidity?”

— Weike Wang

33. “You have a brain and two hands, look up the answer yourself. You want to know how to get through life? Pay attention.”

— Weike Wang

34. “Another theory about hair, not from my mother, but from the best friend. A woman who cuts her hair drastically is set to make some decisions.”

— Weike Wang

35. “Write what you don’t know or write what you want to know.”

— Weike Wang

36. “The mark of a poor comedian is not making the other person laugh. The mark of a worse comedian is asking if the person got it.”

— Weike Wang

37. “Some bonds are so forged in fire, some experiences are so permeated with feeling, that it is impossible to not see them with love.”

— Weike Wang

38. “Home could be many things. It could be both a comfort and a pain. It could exile you for a little while but then demand that you return.”

— Weike Wang

39. “THERE IS NO REAL fight against death because death will always win. But death can be handled well or poorly.”

— Weike Wang

40. “The baby has become sentient. When we walk, she screams across the street at other babies, baby expletives, we think. Something along the lines of God-damn it other baby, don’t try to out-cute me. To make matters worse, she is very cute, so we have a hard time correcting her.”

— Weike Wang

41. “A daughter of immigrants is the daughter of guests, is a part-time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow. She stays in a guesthouse.”

— Weike Wang

42. “I hated this. Hated the sense that I got from Fang that there was some magical beanstalk I had to climb. Nothing good comes from climbing beanstalks, didn’t he know that? There are giants up there. But Fang did know. The whole point was to climb to the giants and become a giant yourself.”

— Weike Wang

43. “The famed MRS degree, because in practice, a female brain is worth nothing. Four lobes of the cerebrum, and I have sometimes imagined one of mine labeled RAGE.”

— Weike Wang

44. “The corners of my mouth naturally droop. I can’t help this. But I try to combat it. I would say that at least 10 percent of my energy is dedicated to keeping my mouth in a straight line.”

— Weike Wang

45. “The surgical ICU had its surgeons and anesthesiologists, doctors who wrote the shortest and most indecipherable notes. The notes reminded me of haikus, and because I wasn’t a literary person, I called my time in this unit difficult poetry.”

— Weike Wang

46. “The joy of having been standardized was that you didn’t need to think beyond a certain area. Like a death handled well, a box had been put around you, and within it you could feel safe.”

— Weike Wang

47. “Quotas haven’t gone away, nor have the large groups of us willing to race against time and one another, but never call ourselves a race.”

— Weike Wang

48. “Only Asians outside of Asia chose names for themselves that took into account the convenience of others or smoothed out their foreign names to be less offensive to the ear.”

— Weike Wang

49. “Hurt can be paid forward and often is, to make your own feel less.”

— Weike Wang

50. “The price of success is steep and I’ve never been able to distinguish it from the feeling of sacrifice. If I could hold success in my hand, it would be a beating heart.”

— Weike Wang