This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Look. I have a strategy. Why expect anything? If you don’t expect anything, you don’t get disappointed.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.

You show you care, you die.You show you fear, you die.You show nothing, maybe you live.

I imagine you working on me as an algebra problem, reducing me to fractions, crossing out common denominators, until there's nothing left on the page but a line that says x = whatever it is that is wrong with me.