Nicole

“The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you'll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like 'Infinite Jest' casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I'll become the kind of person who seems as if he should have that book but chooses not to.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir

“Something terrible is always already happening. We are always unaware that we already live on the precipice of tragedy.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True: A Memoir