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

About the author

Popular quotes

“Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from A Wizard of Earthsea

“I didn't know you were re­lated to Se­wall Boat House too,' she said.

'Yeah. I come from a long line of wood and stone.”
― Erich Segal, quote from Love Story

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion

“In the meantime, when he went on his way back, the seed had grown into a tree which reached up to the sky. Then thought the peasant, 'As thou hast the chance, thou must just see what the angels are doing up there above, and for once have them before thine eyes.' So he climbed up, and saw that the angels above were threshing oats, and he looked on.”
― Jacob Grimm, quote from Grimm's Fairy Tales

“I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from Message in a Bottle

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.