Quotes from When the Emperor Was Divine

“And if anyone asks, you're Chinese. The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese." "And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain." "In your dreams," said the boy. "In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Summer was a long hot dream.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place. That's not him, we said to our mother, That's not him, but our mother no longer seemed to hear us..."Did you...she said. "Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms...”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“As the days grew longer our father began spending more and more time alone in his room. He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. IQ. with us on the radio. "There's already enough noise in my head," he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he'd get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.

In the evening he often went to bed early, at seven, right after supper - 'Might as well get the day over with' - but he slept poorly and woke often from the same recurring dream: It was five minutes past curfew and he was trapped outside, in the world, on the wrong side of the fence. "I've got to get back,' he'd wake up shouting.

'You're home now,' our mother would remind him. 'It's all right. You can stay.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“The night of his arrest, he asked me to go get him a glass of water. We'd just gone to bed and I was so tired. I was exhausted. So I told him to go get it himself. 'Next time I will,' he said, and then he rolled over and went right to sleep. Later, as they were taking him away, all I could think was, 'Now he'll always be thirsty.' Even now, in my dreams, he's still searching for water.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Don't touch me," said the girl. "I want to be sick by myself."

"That's impossible," said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“In early autumn the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: 'No Japs Allowed.' Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“A memory from before: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. "They let me turn the handle," she said, "but they wouldn't let me jump." She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“The ads in the papers all said 'help wanted, will train,' but wherever she went she was turned down. "The position's just been filled," she was told again and again. Or, "We wouldn't want to upset the other employees." At the department store where she had once bought all her hats and silk stockings they would not hire her as a cashier because they were afraid of offending the customers. Instead they offered her work adding up sales slips in a small dark room in the back where no one could see her but she politely declined.

"I was afraid I'd ruin my eyes back there," she told us. "I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and ... offend myself.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger's backyard, our mother's rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. We would go back to school again. We would study hard, every day, to make up for lost time. We would seek out our old classmates. “Where were you?” they’d ask, or maybe they would just nod and say, “Hey.” We would join their clubs, after school, if they let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“We didn't know. We didn't want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Every few days the letters arrived, tattered and torn, from Lordsburg, New Mexico. Sometimes entire sentences had been cut out with a razor blade by the censors and the letters did not make any sense. Sometimes they arrived in one piece, but with half of the words blacked out. Always, they were signed, "From Papa, With Love.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do. I’m your florist. I’m your grocer. I’m your porter. I’m your waiter. I’m the owner of the dry-goods store on the corner of Elm. I’m the shoeshine boy. I’m the judo teacher. I’m the Buddhist priest. I’m the Shinto priest. I’m the Right Reverend Yoshimoto. So prease to meet you. (…) I’m the one you call Jap. I’m the one you call Nip. I’m the one you call Slits. I’m the one you call Slopes. I’m the one you call Yellowbelly. I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all—we all look alike. I’m the one you see everywhere—we’re taking over the neighborhood. I’m the one you look for under your bed every night before you go to sleep. (…) I’m your nightmare…”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“If we did something wrong, we made sure to say excuse me (excuse me for looking at you, excuse me for sitting here, excuse me for coming back). If we did something terribly wrong we immediately said we were sorry (I’m sorry I touched your arm. I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, I didn’t see it resting there so quietly, so beautifully, so perfectly, so irresistibly, on the edge of the desk. I lost my balance and brushed against it by mistake, I was standing too close, I wasn’t watching where I was going, somebody pushed me from behind, I never wanted to touch you, I have always wanted to touch you, I will never touch you again, I promise, I swear…).”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Or maybe, it's just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there's no getting them back. That's just how it is.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“Their old life seemed far away and remote to him now, like a dream he could not quite remember. The bright green grass, the roses, the house on the wide street not far from the sea -- that was another time, a different year.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“And if they ask you someday what it was I most wanted to say, please tell them, if you would, it was this:

I'm sorry.

There. That's it. I've said it. Now can I go?”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

“He put down his suitcase and looked at her.
"Did you..."she said,
"Every day,"he replied.”
― Julie Otsuka, quote from When the Emperor Was Divine

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Popular quotes

“They say that God never closes a door without opening a window.
I hate that saying. Closing a door is an asshole move, and opening a window just means you can look at, but not take part in, whatever is on the other side. Or maybe the window is there so you can throw yourself out of it.
Either way, it's a shitty deal, and why wouldn't you just kick the door back open?”
― Andra Brynn, quote from Where I End and You Begin

“By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a familiar turning of some inward tide. As they drove over the bridge the sun seemed to move from a cheerful daytime yellow to an early-evening gold; painful how the gold light hit the riverbanks, rich and sorrowful, drawing from Amy some longing, a craving for joy.”
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“When is truth pleasing? It is only when we clothe it's nakedness with rags of imagination, or sweeten it with fiction, that it can please.”
― H. Rider Haggard, quote from Dawn

“When she came out, Preeti was waiting by her cot. “You coming to breakfast?” she said accusatorially, as if Shay had already abandoned her for a second time.”
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“One truth, then, is that Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs. A deeper truth, though, one that scripture suggests when it speaks of the eternal Word being made specific flesh, is that there is no permutation of humanity in which Christ is not present. If every Bible is lost, if every church crumbles to dust, if the last believer in the last prayer opens her eyes and lets it all finally go, Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see.”
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