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Father/The Chin Chin Man
Anne is one of Gifty’s closest friends from her undergrad degree program. They meet in an Integrated Science course at Harvard, where they are assigned to the same lab group. Although Gifty had taken a great deal of notice of Anne, she herself didn’t come to Anne’s attention until she defends religious belief one day in class. Anne, intrigued, befriends Gifty. The two share an intense, intimate, and almost sexual friendship despite the differences in their upbringings. Anne is an atheist, multiracial, and outspoken in her opinions. But she is also the first person to truly see and appreciate Gifty for who she is. Despite their different attitudes towards faith, she tells Gifty that she loves Gifty best when she’s defending religion, because that’s when she’s the most authentic. Nevertheless, Gifty decides to reject this intimacy, allowing their friendship to die when Anne graduates and goes off to medical school.
Anne Quotes in Transcendent Kingdom
The Transcendent Kingdom quotes below are all either spoken by Anne or refer to Anne. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 48
Quotes
She would tell me stories about her sister and then look at me expectantly as though I were meant to trade. A sister story for a brother story, but I wouldn’t do it. Anne’s stories about her sister, about the parties they’d gone to, the people they’d slept with, they didn’t feel like an even trade for the stories I had about Nana. My Nana stories didn’t have happy endings. His years of partying, of sleeping around, they didn’t end with him holding down a job in finance in New York, as Anne’s sister did. And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 50
Quotes
It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.
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Anne Quotes in Transcendent Kingdom
The Transcendent Kingdom quotes below are all either spoken by Anne or refer to Anne. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 48
Quotes
She would tell me stories about her sister and then look at me expectantly as though I were meant to trade. A sister story for a brother story, but I wouldn’t do it. Anne’s stories about her sister, about the parties they’d gone to, the people they’d slept with, they didn’t feel like an even trade for the stories I had about Nana. My Nana stories didn’t have happy endings. His years of partying, of sleeping around, they didn’t end with him holding down a job in finance in New York, as Anne’s sister did. And it wasn’t fair. That was the thing that was at the heart of my reluctance and my resentment. Some people make it out of their stories unscathed, thriving. Some people don’t.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 50
Quotes
It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.
