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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Life is a boat,” Sister Nhã, the Catholic nun who had raised Phong, once told him. “When you depart from your first anchor—your mother’s womb—you will be pulled away by unexpected currents. If you can fill your boat with enough hope, enough self-belief, enough compassion, and enough curiosity, you will be ready to weather all the storms of life.”
Persistence turns a bar of iron into a needle.
A proverb said that rough seas make better seamen, but Trang knew wars made tougher women. Despite the challenges, her mother had always been determined that her two daughters be brought up properly. “Just like your banana plants, you need good soil,” she’d said. “And your soil is your education.”
songs. Phong fell in love with the music because it mirrored life. In each song he saw the struggles and courage of ordinary working people. He realized that he needed music as much as food and air.
When she left, he felt something had been born between them, like a seed being sown into fresh soil after the rain.
We are the unwilling Led by the unqualified Doing the unnecessary For the ungrateful.
she had been a dry field thirsting for rain.
With the fire of war burning, it needed more men as firewood.
“Everyone needs a father. A child with no father is a home without its roof.
Thiên squatted down in front of a bamboo basket heaped with white grains. How lucky for the guy, Dan thought, that he could get so excited about such everyday things.
Those in power feared free minds, and nothing unlocked thinking like literature.
for those who had been wronged to be able to forgive.
Trang held back tears thinking about all the women who were reaching out with helpful hands while no man did so much as lift his.
She knew now that to live without imagination was only to exist, and to be without books was the greatest punishment.
He must shed his past, to be free, to transform himself into a new person—someone calm and
