Hà Linh

“Confetti
green, how I want you green.
Green despite the red despite
the rest.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow and desolation.
An inexplicable surfeit of absurd grief, a sorrow so lonely, so bereft, so metaphysically mine...”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“[...] I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state ‘I hurt’ or ‘I hate’ or ‘I want’. Or, indeed, ‘Look at me’. And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.”
― Anita Brookner, Look at Me