Nhi C

“I’ll bet you don’t know, Chuck, how Saigon got its name, do you?” exclaimed Joseph at last, closing the book and jumping to his feet. “It’s really quite interesting.” “I don’t know how it got its name, no,” replied the older boy smiling patiently, “but no doubt some book-reading bore is about to inform me.” “In old Annamese it means ‘Village of the Boxwoods,’ after the trees that originally grew there. It wasn’t much more than a fishing village until the eighteenth century when French Jesuits and a few merchants demanded the right to build a city. But its name could also be based on the Chinese characters ‘Tsai Con,’ which mean ‘Tribute paid to the West.’” “Fascinating,” said Chuck facetiously. “You’re still king of the useless-information department.”
― Anthony Grey, Saigon

“Mrs. Turton says that if you lived to be eighty years old, your heart would beat three billion times. I was thinking about that, trying to imagine a number that large. Three billion. Count back three billion hours, and modern humans don’t exist—just wild-eyed cave people, all hairy and grunting. Three billion years, and life itself barely exists. And yet here’s your heart, doing its job all the time, one beat after the next, all the way up to three billion.”
― Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”
― Alan Alda

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes...you're Doing Something.”
― Neil Gaiman