“My heart is its own fierce country where no one else is welcome.”

“I don't think I fully appreciated how relaxing it is having someone I can be really mean to. It's going to be so hard being nice all the time.”

“Mothers are generally starvers or feeders”

“... consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean to me? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.”

“How many times do your feet have to press down on a path before they make an imprint, before pieces of soul start sticking?”

“Vân Uoc decided that she too would get to know the book inside out. And something miraculous happened when they were about a quarter of the way through reading it. After weeks of ploughing and hesitating, something clicked; she stopped stumbling over the unknown words and long sentences. Words magically started to reveal meaning, most of the time anyway, through context. And the sentences themselves stopped being obstacles and started telling a story. Her eyes were racing ahead; she was comprehending the shape and rhythm of the language.”

“She'd always been comforted by how many words there were in the English language -- more than a million. With so many words surely anything could be said, everything could be under”

“Van Uoc felt the stab of a sad truth: she and her mother would never be as close as her mother and grandmother had been.Her mother got up, stretched her tidy, graceful frame and headed for the kitchen. Van Uoc wanted to be able to offer her some comfort, but what could she say? Her mother was right. The two of them represented an irreconcilable cultural split. Distance between them was inevitable.”

“My heart is its own fierce country where no one else is welcome.”

“I'm floating. The absence of pain is powerful.”

“Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.”