Kammy Lai Quotes

Just because the snow is cold, It doesn't mean it won't melt. ~ Lai Lar

One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds. ~ Jimenez Lai

As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do. ~ Jimenez Lai

I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl! ~ Thanhha Lai

Whoever invented English
should have learned
to spell. ~ Thanhha Lai

For the survivors, the disaster of the Indy is their My Lai massacre or Watergate, a touchstone moment of historic disappointment: the navy put them in harm's way, hundreds of men died violently, and then the government refused to acknowledge its culpability.

What's amazing, however, is that these men, unlike contemporary generations who've been disappointed by bad government, are not bitter. Somehow, a majority brushed aside their feelings of rancor and went on to help build the booming postwar American economy of the fifties. ~ Doug Stanton

The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better. ~ Jimenez Lai

This is what it's like to drown: You take a last look at the sky, a last breath, slowly. Air goes into your lungs and then you are under water. You let the air out molecule by molecule, realizing for the first time how precious it is, this thing that feels so much like nothing, neither liquid nor solid. Your eyes are open wide. The world goes cool and green and you keep falling. There are shapes in the darkness, fronds of river weed waving, dark indescribable things that float and then sink with you. You never knew you were so heavy. The density of your flesh has never been of such prime importance. The air leaks out of you in spite of your mightiest attempts to hold it. You need more but there is none. Leafy things flail. The water's coolness is no longer soothing. You gasp. Water rushes into your lungs and floods them. Your eyes stare wider. You thrash. You want more than anything to live, to be able to rise again, but you keep falling. The river is bottomless. It pushes you along in the direction of its current like an impatient auntie, but it won't let you to the surface. Your eyes are wide open, but slowly everything goes black. You begin to float beneath the surface. You are conscious of the coolness again, of how green everything is. You move with the water and through it. You have left your body far behind. The river has become a part of you. ~ Larissa Lai

I'm practicing
to be seen. ~ Thanhha Lai

Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession. ~ Jimenez Lai

I can't make my brothers
go live elsehwere,
but I can
hide their sandals. ~ Thanhha Lai

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary. ~ Jimenez Lai

In order to break free from the chains that bind, one must take whatever action they can to disconnect internally from the larger systems of oppression, of which the family unit is merely a microcosm. ~ Sil Lai Abrams

I need the lessons.
I'm hiding in class
by staring at my shoes.
I'm hiding during lunch
in the bathroom,
eating hard rolls
saved from dinner.
I'm hiding during outside time
in the same bathroom.
I'm hiding after school
until Brother Khôi
rides up to
our secret corner.
With Vu Lee
I squat in
weight on legs,
back straight
arms at my sides,
fingers relaxed,
eyes everywhere at once

I'm practicing to be seen. ~ Thanhha Lai

I step back,
hating pity,
having learned
from Mother that
the pity giver
feels better,
never the pity receiver. ~ Thanhha Lai

Oh, my daughter,
at times you have to fight,
but preferably
not with your fists. ~ Thanhha Lai

Or is it the opposite-that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we've reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief.

Assume for a moment that it's not silly to see things this man's way. What cogent, compelling, relevant message can the center and left offer him? Can we bear to admit that we've actually helped set him up to hear "We 're better than they are" not as twi ~ David Foster Wallace

If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform. ~ Jimenez Lai

The world is meaningless and therefore it's funny. ~ Jimenez Lai

We glide and I feel as if I'm floating. ~ Thanhha Lai

What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live. ~ Jimenez Lai

How easily we abandon those who have suffered the same persecutions as we have. How quickly we grow impatient with their inability to transcend the conditions of our lives. ~ Larissa Lai

No, Mr. Johnston doesn't have a horse, nor has he ever ridden one. What kind of a cowboy is he? ~ Thanhha Lai

My curse: rebellious in my head but oh-so-lovely in real life. ~ Thanhha Lai

Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities. ~ Jimenez Lai

I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. ~ Jimenez Lai

Many artists I enjoy have a large body of work, and eventually the message is derived out from the sum of its parts. ~ Jimenez Lai

A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world. ~ Assata Shakur

Aesthetics is both politics and philosophy, a series of agreements and disagreements between subjective minds. ~ Jimenez Lai

Everyone knows the ship could sink, unable to hold the piles of bodies that keep crawling on like raging ants from a disrupted nest. But no one is heartless enough to say stop because what if they had been stopped before their turn? ~ Thanhha Lai

The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either. ~ Jimenez Lai

When I would present my work as a student, often I would hear, "Your project is too formal" - it's too form-based; it's too form-driven. Which is kind of shocking for a visual practice, for someone to say something discouraging about a focus on an exploration of aesthetics. ~ Jimenez Lai

The hardest - the part that's hard is to kill, but once you kill, that becomes easier, to kill the next person and the next one and the next one." -Varnado Simpson, Charlie Company of My Lai ~ Jonathan Glover

Tzu Li went to see Tzu Lai who was dying. Leaning against the door, he said, 'Great is the Creator! What will he make of you now? Will he make you into a rat's liver? Will he make you into an insect's leg?' Tzu-Lai replied, 'The universe gave me my body so I may be carried, my life so I may work, my old age so I may repose, and my death so I may rest. To regard life as good is the way to regard death as good ... If I regard the universe as a great furnace and creation as a master foundryman, why should anywhere I go not be all right?' ~ Zhuangzi

Black seeds spill like clusters of eyes, wet and crying. ~ Thanhha Lai

Setting up absurd worlds with rules to violate - it's one of the things I hope to achieve with my work. ~ Jimenez Lai

I am a cultural Frankenstein ~ Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen

Life is easy and hard, beautiful and ugly. ~ Thanhha Lai