Hà Linh

“People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world [...] such people will always be unhappy. It is true [...] that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin."

-from "Things: A Story of the Sixties”
― Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties / A Man Asleep

“I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“I was always watching you." This could have been a breathless declaration of love or a final farewell.”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

“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