Thanhha Lai Quotes

#1. Mother warns
how we act today
foretells the whole year

Thanhha Lai

#2. Every time I drift away I lose myself in you. And now I see I can be me in every thing I do.

Michelle Branch

#3. Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to.

Thanhha Lai

#4. Would be simpler
if English
and life
were logical

Thanhha Lai

#5. Mother says,
People share
when they know they have escaped hunger.
Shouldn't people share
because there is hunger?

Thanhha Lai

#6. What use is it for me to force my nature? / For my nature shall always remain / What it is and conquer what belongs to it, / However men may narrow its path.

Hadewijch

#7. I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl!

Thanhha Lai

#8. The school made it very clear that women were entitled to positions of authority. That sense of entitlement allowed us to feel that we have a natural place in leadership in the world. That gave me a mental and emotional confidence.

Linda Vester

#9. When you go into a fight saying you're probably going to lose, you're probably going to lose.

Maureen Dowd

#10. Mostly, I wish I were still smart.

Thanhha Lai

#11. I wish
our cowboy could be persuaded
to buy a horse,

that I could be invisible
until I can talk back

Thanhha Lai

#12. MiSSS SScott
points to the numbers
along the wall.
I count up to twenty.
The class claps
on its own.
I'm furious,
unable to explain
I already learned
fractions and how to purify water.
So this is what dumb feels like. I hate, hate,
hate it.

Thanhha Lai

#13. People living on others' goodwill cannot afford political opinions.

Thanhha Lai

#14. Oh, my daughter,
at times you have to fight,
but preferably
not with your fists.

Thanhha Lai

#15. Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress.

Marc Andreesen

#16. I step back,
hating pity,
having learned
from Mother that
the pity giver
feels better,
never the pity receiver.

Thanhha Lai

#17. All day
I practice
squeezing hisses
through my teeth.

Whoever invented
English
must have loved
snakes.

Thanhha Lai

#18. 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

#19. Courage is your natural setting. You do not need to become courageous, but rather peel back the layers of self-protective, limiting beliefs that keep you small.

Vironika Tugaleva

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

Thanhha Lai

#21. For the rest, all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered.

C.S. Lewis

#22. My curse: rebellious in my head but oh-so-lovely in real life.

Thanhha Lai

#23. This year I hope
I truly learn
to fly-kick
not to kick anyone
so much as
to fly.

Thanhha Lai

#24. Why no s for two deer,
but an s for two monkeys?
Brother Quang says
no one knows.
So much for rules!
Whoever invented English should be bitten by a snake.

Thanhha Lai

#25. Even one billion Chinese do not a superpower make.

John Lukacs

#26. We glide and I feel as if I'm floating.

Thanhha Lai

#27. No one would believe me but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama.-Inside Out and Back Again

Thanhha Lai

#28. Whoever invented English
should have learned
to spell.

Thanhha Lai

#29. Mother tells me,
They tease you
because they adore you.

Thanhha Lai

#30. I tell you of my loss, child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours.

Thanhha Lai

#31. Our lives
will twist and twist,
intermingling the old and the new
until it doesn't matter
which is which.

Thanhha Lai

#32. Black seeds spill like clusters of eyes, wet and crying.

Thanhha Lai

#33. How can we scramble away like rats, without honor, without dignity, when everyone must help rebuild the country?

Thanhha Lai