Kim Thuy Quotes

#1. A Saigon Proverb: Doe la chine tran, neu buon la thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.

Kim Thuy

#2. History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago.

Kim Thuy

#3. As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.

Kim Thuy

#4. If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned.

Kim Thuy

#5. I learned that music comes from the voice, the rhythm and the heart of each person, and that the musicality of those unrecorded melodies could lift the curtain of fog, pass through windows and screens to waken us as gently as a morning lullaby.

Kim Thuy

#6. I moved forward in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.

Kim Thuy

#7. Love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters.

Kim Thuy

#8. Intensely craving a salad of green papaya with bird chilies that tore your mouth apart, that burned your lips, set fire to your heart.

Kim Thuy

#9. And also, where an outstretched hand is no longer a gesture but a moment of love, lasting until sleep, until waking, until everyday life.

Kim Thuy

#10. Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream

Kim Thuy

#11. Elsewhere, people are too preoccupied by their day-to-day survival to take the time to write their collective history.

Kim Thuy

#12. If I had known what it meant to love, I wouldn't have had children, because once we love, we love forever, like Uncle Two's wife, Step-aunt Two, who can't stop loving her gambler son, the son who is burning up the family fortune like a pyromaniac.

Kim Thuy

#13. A Vietnamese saying has it that "Only those with long hair are afraid, for no one can pull the hair of those who have none." And so I try as much as possible to acquire only those things that don't extend beyond the limits of my body.

Kim Thuy

#14. From country to country as if it were an anchor, or the memory of dropping the first anchor.

Kim Thuy

#15. He is someone who lives in the moment, with no affection for the past. He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurement.

Kim Thuy

#16. I remember some students in my high school who complained about the compulsory history classes. Young as we were, we didn't realize that the course was a privilege only countries at peace can afford. Elsewhere,

Kim Thuy

#17. He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man.

Kim Thuy