Annie Chen > Recent Status Updates

Why do we have so many languages? How do I live in a world where I would find it very difficult to understand some lives, though these lives themselves are entirely whole. And I wonder about how two could speak the same language but be entirely unable to comprehend one another.

Anyway, great book so far.

This book cuts deep.

“When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

“She was desperately sorry for what she had said. She didn’t know where those words had come from. She didn’t know that she’d had them in her. But they were out now, and wouldn’t go back in.”

“You plan your escape because no matter how much color there is or how much color you make yourself see, you’ve watched every beautiful thing disappear from here. Made murky by night and darkness and shadow.
You plan your escape because you’ve seen your world turn black.
You plan your escape.
But you’re never really ready to go.”

Really moved by immigration stories these days

This introductory essay on poverty suddenly jogged a memory of me leaving my best friend behind without a second thought to chase after the fickle attention of a boy. The abandonment of an ailing grandmother for a chance at seeing the movies seems a temporary delusions against poverty that parallels my temporary delusions of love. Maybe real love and richness lie with the grandmother, as it did with my best friend.

Stealthily reading this on the bookshelves of a bookstore, unbeknownst to the lovely bookstore owner. Don’t worry I bought three books from him today so the moral scales have been leveled.

Never really thought about the complete redesign of an economy for job creation through political transition. Where do people go? How do we reduce the number of people who fall through the cracks and end up without basic support? What kind of industries do we want to build, and what will it take to get there?

I’m very convinced that you can’t be a politician without first being kind. Logic can get you into some pretty deep dark holes if you can’t empathize with human suffering, or if you don’t even recognize you’re the cause of so much suffering.

I’m so pissed off.

Ok so I just learned “Deng was hard of hearing in his right ear.” Given I, too, am hard of hearing in my right ear - 50 years before Deng if I may add - I think my future in economics is pretty bright and shiny ✨

We sometimes think of moral reasoning as a way of persuading other people. But it is also a way of sorting out our own moral convictions, of figuring out what we believe and why

Kierkegaard said corn is important in being a perfect person. Haven’t had corn in a while.

Ahhhhhh 🥹

Omfg the helmet, I can’t 😭

Ok ah fuck this is so cute. Fuck

Aaaahhhhhhh 🥹🥹🥹

Searched all my bags for my stickies, but here we are.

“‘Tomorrow after you leave I will stand here at this window and remember that yesterday you were right here with me.’

And now she’s dead and I have that feeling all the time, no matter where I stand.”

I am so sad

I’m about 1 page in and already crying bc I miss my family so fucking much

“Whatever he started thinking about, he came back to the same questions, which he could not resolve and could not stop asking himself. It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had been stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.”