amanda*ೃ༄

“Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone whole.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“There comes a moment for the immigrant's child when you realize you and your parents are assimilating at the same time. Later, I understood that we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future -- that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn't fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True