Nicole

“the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss also believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn’t just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You’re beholden to the “spirit of the gift,” a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one’s ring of associations.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“I remember leaning back in my chair and laughing as thunderously as physically possible. We were boisterous and loud, because we needed to be. I revealed Ken’s secrets, telling our friends the things he adored about them. I told girls he secretly loved that he had loved them.”
― 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

“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