“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”— Ocean Vuong, newyorker.com
“Maybe a survivor is nothing but the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.”— Ocean Vuong, newyorker.com
“It only takes a single night of frost to kill off an entire generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.”— Ocean Vuong, newyorker.com
“When we make love, Clarence Nathan, feels like he is entering his own history.”— Colum McCann, amazon.com
“How long do you plan to keep dancing with the ghosts of your past instead of letting them go?”— Nikita Gill, meanwhilepoetry.tumblr.com
“Everything I know about my family’s history, I know in fragments. We are the keepers of secrets. We are secrets ourselves. We try to protect each other from the geography of so much sorrow. I don’t know that we succeed.”— Roxane Gay, amazon.com
“He wished she would trust him with the details of her past, not because he was under the illusion that he could somehow rescue her or felt that she even needed to be rescued, but because giving voice to the truth of her past meant opening the door to the future. It meant they would be able to have a…”— Nicholas Sparks, amazon.com
“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, amazon.com
“When we know something well, we don't realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.”— Steven Pinker, amazon.com