D. Rice,

“It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.

...the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you...the look when someone recognizes you.

I'm going to write about all this one day, I told her, and she smiled at me.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Human beings, Adina faxes, did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters. A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track. Upon encountering real problems, human beings compare their lives to riding a roller coaster, even though they invented roller coasters to be fun things to do on their days off.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful you'll encounter the only other person in line buying the same obscure thing as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of person who has books like 'Infinite Jest' casually strewn on his cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I'll become the kind of person who seems as if he should have that book but chooses not to.”
― Hua Hsu, Stay True

“Because, like many things humans enjoy, it frees them from their bodies. Other examples are blankets and robes. People are forever yammering about some great robe they encountered in a hotel.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland