Gioia

“Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Because something in him know she'd be there. That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting. I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you're here, you'r ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theatre of belonging.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

“In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous