Scott Methe

“When we arrived at the home of our childbirth instructor, Brenda, she was arranging candles in an earthen vessel filled with sand. Brenda’s son, who had shown us into the room, cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention, then retreated with the quick step of a middle-school-aged boy in the same room as a gigantic poster of a uterus.”
― Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I understood then what my aunt had been trying to tell me, just as I knew my parents still loved me. I knew they wanted the best for me, now and in the future. But they wanted to see their own feelings in the photos, not mine. They wanted me to see myself in the same way they did. My parents, I knew, wanted to see disappointment.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Wish

“As a girl, you watched, from a banana grove, your schoolhouse collapse after an American napalm raid. At five, you never stepped into a classroom again. Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous