Pop Song Quotes

“...I missed even the idea of home. But it seems to me that if you are someone who leaves, then you must always be leaving, because to stop leaving is to stay, which holds its own consequences. The space between staying and leaving, I think, is called longing.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“When I say I have a crush on you, what I'm saying is that I'm in love with the distance between us. I'm not in love with you: I don't even know you. I'm in love with the escape that fantasizing about you promises.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“How impossible is it to say aloud that you want love? Not just love—I wanted proof of its existeince, that I deserved it. I cried thinking about it.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“It seems to me that if you are someone who leaves, then you must always be leaving, because to stop leaving is to stay, which holds its own consequences. The space between leaving and staying, I think, is called longing.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Why is it that I can hardly bear to be in a moment as it's happening, but I take a picture instead, so I can experience it that way? I'm so bad at being present. I puncture the moment right as it reaches its zenith-- capture it, like a butterfly in a killing jar. Then, the photograph becomes a stand-in, pinned on velvet, for the feelings I didn't allow myself to fully feel.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I used to pay attention to the clouds in the sky,” Martin was quoted as saying. “I paid close attention for a month to see if they ever repeated. They don’t repeat. And I don’t think life does either.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“It's a crush because it's not real. Not yet, not maybe ever. I'd be content to spend forever in this liminal, cresting place, the interval before we know each other.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Outside, it had begun to rain. Over the steam of my milky coffee, I looked out the window to see umbrellas popping open on the sidewalk, some red or colorfully patterned, but mostly black. They looked like mushrooms sprouting on a log. Soon I would be down there, with all of those people-- I felt, bathetically, a spike of warmth for every person in the world. My body ached, but I felt strong. Maybe it was finally getting over the jetlag, or maybe it was feeling as if I had finally gone to the end of my loneliness, gone to its furthest expanse. I finished my coffee. I dressed for the day.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“What if, you said, you could be at peace with the idea that it all makes sense?”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Wasn't this all I had ever wanted-- a life of freedom, and someone beside me to share it with? It was a warm day and I was with you, anointed in bergamot and geranium leaf and freshly fucked. Yet here I was with the killing jar again, savaging my present to pin it on the wall. I couldn't stop seeing the moment for what it could be, rather than simply what it was.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“My friend Santi once said that when I'm hurt I wear my hurt like two little horns. You attack people with it, they said, and force them to listen to you.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“You have your vessel, with its shimmering fluid, and I have mine. And I cannot see into yours, and you cannot see into mine. Your heart is so dark to me, and so obscure. But somehow I must trust you, and we must make this work, this whole business of talking to each other, trying to take care of each other, each carrying our amphora of fragrant wine.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Sometimes it's easier to write to you, or to speak to you without seeing your face. I feel like I can be more honest about who I am and what I need.

I wanted to show you the real me-- not the version of myself I thrust in front of me at all times like a cardboard cutout, anticipating the pain of being misunderstood. Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway. I was so used to that kind of disclosure-- a way of being seen without really being seen.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Sometimes, I listen to your voice on the phone, and I think to myself, yes, you have it, even from two thousand miles away.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“That happens to me, often, crying while speaking. It never happens when I expect. It's surprising to hear that same moment, the point of almost breaking, in someone else. I never think it'll have an effect on me in a recording, far removed from the source, but it does, like a key that opens a secret compartment full of water, or a flower that has been tight in a bud so long you forgot what it looked like in bloom.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I thought of myself as haunted. Like a cave, or something dark and underwater, bristling with rocks and dead coral.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Here's the great problem of my life: I always want it to always be like this.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“When I ate something I really loved at a restaurant, I'd ask my parents if we could order another, just to have it, so I wouldn't have to worry about finishing it all and having none left. I was so scared of the moment leaving, I always wanted to grab its tail and make it last forever.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“If I'm willing to lose myself in what can be said without words, it must be the voicing of my own feelings I'm frightened of. Or, no, it's the asking, and worse yet, the needing. That's what paints me as a discrete and vulnerable subject, and opens me to disappointment-- and that which is worse than disappointment, the kind of hurt I can't anticipate.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Is that the lack that Carson writes of-- a lack of expression-- or is it something different? Does desire always require relinquishing control? It seems that that runs counter to what I, absurdly, want-- which is to long for you, silently, until you wake up one morning and know, without being told, exactly what I need and how to give it to me.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I'm not normally like this, I want to explain from behind my fanned hands. But you've threatened to see me.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Telling you about the way I came to be the way that I am, or the only way I used to think I could be.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I watched you run your hand slowly along the metal, the way you touched me sometimes. I tried to imagine how it felt, then, the patina of the steel on your palm.p”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I had taken you to my blue, my bluest mountain, but the blue wasn't there anymore.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I was newly in a relationship and trying my best to be vulnerable. I knew I was - I knew I could be - so happy with you. If only I could allow it. But at the same time I felt inescapably haunted, by the rape, by a history of poor treatment. My body refused to trust. My body refused to stop thinking it was in the presence of a threat.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“I've always been aware of what my existence means, that my presence here— wherever here might be— is the result of an absence somewhere else.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

“Sometimes, though no one ever asks, I say that it was moving to the East Coast that led me to understand that I was raced—to understand that the gaze upon my body bore the effects of a system far larger than me. I could no longer think of myself as a neutral subject; no one was, and in that realization there was a kind of relief. Emboldened by my reading, I began to consider my own Asian-Americanness, and within it to draw a distinction between East and Southeast Asian, finally acknowledging the effects of being a repeatedly colonized subject—the ways women who looked like me had been degraded and degraded. Because I was emphatically a brown girl fucking, I related to the term ABJECT so much that I made endless puns about it: ABJECT PERMENANCE, ABJECT STORY, ABJECT OF YOUR AFFECTION. For that was how I felt, melodramatic as it was: cast-off, objectified. Kristeva was the spotlight that illuminated my condition.”
― Larissa Pham, Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy