Bich Minh Nguyen Quotes

I doubled back to school and overheard Mrs. Andersen in the classroom talking to another teacher. "Can you believe it?" she was saying. "A foreigner winning our spelling bee!

I looked back all the time, too much, too often. Like Rose, I would be circling my mother the rest of my life.

If you want to rule your life with obligations to other people, that's you.

Everyone is always leaving each other, chasing down the next seeming opportunity - home or body. Where does it stop? Does it ever? I want to believe it all leads to something grander than the imagination, grander than the end-stop of the Pacific. Or is that it: You get to the place where you land; you are tired now; you settle. You settle. You build a home and raise a family. There are years of eating and arguing, working and waking. There are years of dying. No one knows what the last image will be.

Or like the way our mother would never get free of her first-generation immigrant mentality. Once in flight she was always in flight, glancing uneasily around before pushing on to another vista that promised better prospects. Maybe it kept her feeling safe. She couldn't have known that it would leave Sam and me feeling the opposite--permanently unsettled, unable to know what could be called home.

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a place devoted to books and quiet; I was filled with a sense of hope. Reading to me was fundamental, as fundamental as food. And nothing could be more satisfying than reading a good book while eating a good meal of mi soup, french fries, and a thin cut of steak. I plowed through books as fast as possible in order to read them again.