Years later Linh would wish that there had been some sign that this moment was the perfect one, balanced on the edge of changing, that the three of them would never again be together and as happy as they were then. But even if he had known, how did one hold time? p. 201
"Remember asking why the people supposed to love us the most are the ones who try to stop us doing what we love?" p. 210
Only the last line spoke to her so she could hear his voice: Each night I pray life is coming back to you, a piece at a time, just as on the burned hills the grass reappears. She studied the photo more closely. The day on the beach at Vung Tau. Linh staring not at the camera but at her. Of course. She had known but ignored what she knew. The war wouldn't be over for her until she saw that grass reappear on those scarred hills.
This is what happened when one left one's home - pieces of oneself scattered all over the world, no one place ever completely satisfied, always a nostalgia for the place left behind. p. 277
"I survived." She forced herself to be nonchalant, not able to stand his pity.
"It should have been me."
"Much easier to be hurt rather than be the one watching it." p.301
The body, he knew, has a memory all its own. the shape of a baby in one's arms will be imprinted forever, the cup of a lover's chin. p.306
One came to love another through repeated touch, he believed, the way a mother bonded with her newborn, the way his family had slept in the communal room, brushing against one another, a patterning through nerve endings, a laying of pulse against pulse, creating a rhythm of blood, and so now he touched, strangers, only fleetingly,without hope. p.326
His anguish had grown skeletal in its solitude. He wished it didn't have be so, that one could ingest pain and keep it from others, but instead it seemed one could only lessen it by inflicting little cuts and bruises of it on another. p. 335
