Oanh

“In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country and a homeland are one and the same: nu’o'c.”
― Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For

“To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all at the same time. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she'd been and the child she'd become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“I can't exactly say why I've chosen to write about the things that I am writing about. There are doubtless better stories from my life that I am missing, events and escapades I am not wise enough to know were important. If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars that they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

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― Lori Lansens, The Girls

“Gardens were meant to be seen, smelled, walked through, grubbed in. A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign