Ru Quotes

“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 Thúy, Ru

“A Saigon Proverb: Doe la chine tran, neu buon la thua. Life is a struggle in which sorrow leads to defeat.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru

“My parents often remind my brothers and me that they won’t have any money for us to inherit, but I think they’ve already passed on to us the wealth of their memories, allowing us to grasp the beauty of a flowering wisteria, the delicacy of a word, the power of wonder. Even more, they’ve given us feet for walking to our dreams, to infinity. Which may be enough baggage to continue our journey on our own. Otherwise, we would pointlessly clutter our path with possessions to transport, to insure, to take care of.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“Elsewhere, people are too preoccupied by their day-to-day survival to take the time to write their collective history.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru

“I should have chosen the moment before the arrival of my children, for since then I've lost the option of dying. The sharp smell of their sun-baked hair, the smell of sweat on their backs when they wake from a nightmare, the dusty smell of their hands when they leave a classroom, meant that I had to live, to be dazzled by the shadow of their eyelashes, moved by a snowflake, bowled over by a tear on their cheek. My children have given me the exclusive power to blow on a wound to make the pain disappear, to understand words unpronounced, to possess the universal truth, to be a fairy. A fairy smitten with the way they smell.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru

“Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“…….one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that into infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture. As for me, it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me. 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 Thúy, Ru

“Après le décès de cette vieille dame, tous les dimanches, j'allais au bord d'un étang à lotus en banlieu de Hanoi, où il y avait toujours deux ou trois femmes au dos arqué, aux mains tremblantes, qui, assises dans le fond d'une barque ronde, se déplaçaient sur l'eau à l'aide d'une perche pour placer des feuilles de thé à l'intérieur des fleurs de lotus ouvertes. Elles y retournaient le jour suivant pour les recueillir, unes à unes, avant que les pétales se fanent, après que les feuilles emprisonnées avaient absorbé le parfum des pistils pendant la nuit. Elles me disaient que chaque feuille de thé conservait ainsi l'âme de ces fleurs éphémères.”
― Kim Thuy, RU

“He had stopped time by continuing to enjoy himself, to live until the end with the lightness of a young man.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“...love comes from the head and not the heart. Of the entire body, only the head matters.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“If a choreographer had been underneath the plastic sheet on a rainy day or night, he would certainly have reproduced the scene: twenty-five people, short and tall, on their feet, each holding a tin can to collect the water that dripped off the roof, sometimes in torrents, sometimes drop by drop. If a musician had been there, he would have heard the orchestration of all that water striking the sides of the tins. If a filmmaker had been there, he would have captured the beauty of the silent and spontaneous complicity between wretched people. But there was only us, standing on a floor that was slowly sinking into the clay.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“He savours every instant of the present as if it were still the best and only time, with no comparisons, no measurements.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“never regret what we’ve left behind.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“That estrangement, that detachment, that distance allow me to buy, without any qualms and with full awareness of what I'm doing, a pair of shoes whose price in my native land would be enough to feed a family of five for one whole year. The salesperson just has to promise me, You'll walk on air, and I but them. When we're able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots -not only by crossing an ocean and two continents but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees, from the empty space of an identity crisis- we can also laugh at whatever might have happened to my acrylic bracelet ...”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“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 could afford. Elsewhere, people are too preoccupied by their day-to-day survival to take the time to write their collective history.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“Every gift we offered was a genuine gift, because it represented a sacrifice and it answered a need, a desire or a dream.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“For us, they didn't see they didn't see the blackboards they wiped clean, the school toilets they scrubbed, the imperial rolls they delivered. They saw only what lay ahead. And so to make progress my brothers and I followed where their eyes led us.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“När jag i Montreal eller på andra platser möter flickor som frivilligt och avsiktligt skadar sig själva och vill få ärr inristade i huden för all framtid, kan jag inte låta bli att i hemlighet önska att de fick möta de där andra flickorna, som också de bär på outplånliga ärr, men så djupa att de är osynliga för blotta ögat. Jag skulle vilja att de träffades så att jag fick höra dem jämföra ett självförvållat ärr med ett som man tillfogats, det ena betalar man för, det andra gör man mot betalning, det ena är synligt och det andra hemligt, det ena är ytligt och det andra går på djupet, det ena är skarpt, det andra suddigt.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru

“He was saved not by the sky but by writing. He had written a number of books during his time in the re-education camp—always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story. Without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky. Nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma. Nights when he was in his kitchen painting wooden ducks, Canada geese, loons, mallards, following the colour scheme provided by his other employer, he would recite for me the words in his personal dictionary: nummular, moan, quadraphony, in extremis, sacculina, logarithmic, hemorrhage—like a mantra, like a march towards the void.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“Photos could not preserve the soul of our first Christmas trees. Those branches gathered in the woods of suburban Montreal, stuck in the rim of a spare tire covered with a white sheet, seem bare and lacking in magic, but in reality they were much prettier than the eight-foot-tall spruce trees we have nowadays.”
― Kim Thúy, Ru: A Novel

“We threw out the mattresses without telling our sponsors. We didn’t want them to be disappointed, because they’d given us their hearts, their time. We appreciated their generosity, but not sufficiently: we did not yet know the cost of time, its fair market value, its tremendous scarcity”
― Kim Thúy, Ru: A Novel