Pema Yangdon

“The hardest thing in the world is to live only once. But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found in here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a light-bulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody's son.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

“the prisons and madhouses have locked them up, so you think you’re the only one out there losing your mind when in fact there are many like you, trapped in this supposedly free world of work and sleep and endless fucking cakes.”
― Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness