As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.

There's nothing more true in being a child of a diaspora, a child of immigrants. We're completely new to our parents. We're not something they can ever understand. And it's not as if we are ever going to be accepted. We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.

Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.