Quynh Anh

“Bạn đang buồn. Bạn nghĩ rằng nếu gặp được một người có lý tưởng lớn, một người đã đọc nhiều sách triết, hoặc đã đi tu, một người viết nhạc giỏi, hoặc làm thơ hay: sự hiểu đời, sự tinh tế của họ sẽ giúp bạn bớt buồn.
Tôi đoán là họ còn buồn hơn chúng ta”
― Đoàn Minh Phượng

“The nostalgic is never a native but a displaced person who mediates between the local and the universal.”
― Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia

“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence. If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition