Brandon Sarmiento

“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

“I began to wonder why I felt like I had to choose one thing over another. I was all of these things. I was a plurality. And I was one thing, one word. I was who I said I was. I had said to Professor Slotten: I'm Phuc. I circled back to my name, the only Phuc I had ever met and the only noun I had for who I was.”
― Phuc Tran, Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In

“That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy. Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death.”
― Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning