Hailie

“This is what I think so many of us who work in the arts and the humanities hope to receive from our universities, from our government, from sometimes skeptical students and their parents: patience and faith in us as we test the limits of our ignorance, as we pursue what may very well be useless, as we go in search of that mystery and intuition that exist within all of us.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees

“The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.” “Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?”
― John Steinbeck, The Short Novels of John Steinbeck

“To think I only asked a simple question, but no question is that simple, right?”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“I am a bad refugee because I insist on seeing the historical reasons that create refugees and the historical reasons for denying refugee status to certain populations.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees