A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the gre...
Our father used to tell us stories about a bookworm named Wally. Wally, a squiggly little vermicule with a red baseball cap, didn't merely like books. He ate them.
Your soul is like your shadow, she said. Sometimes it just wanders off like a butterfly and that is when you are sad and that's when you get sick, and if it comes back to you, that is when you are hap...
You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will...
It would never have occurred to them to emulate Luis Estevez, a pediatrician at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, who has referred Puerto Rican and Dominican patients to a Santeria high priest as he migh...
It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the libr...
I remember having a little bit of a feeling of awe at how differently we looked at the world. It was very foreign to me that they had the ability to stand firm in the face of an expert opinion.
Also, although the great majority of the letters I’ve received from Hmong readers have been positive, most of the negative ones have criticized me for telling a story that was not mine to tell. I am n...
Believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wanton...
Wine stores should organize their bottles not by origin and varietal but by alcohol content and intensity of flavor,
We expect a wine of quality to demand something from us.
He never had fewer than seven jobs and at one point had thirteen.
The Hmong have a phrase, hais cuaj txub kaum txub, which means to speak of all kinds of things. It is often used at the beginning of an oral narrative as a way of reminding the listeners that the worl...
Our view of reality is only a view, not reality itself.
I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet.
His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality...
Every Hmong has a different version of what is commonly called The Promise: a written or oral contract, made by CIA personnel in Laos, that if they fought for the Americans, the Americans would aid th...
Dan Murphy's diagnosis added Lia Lee to a distibguished line of epileptics that has inlcuded Soren Kierkegaard, Vincent van Gogh, Gustave Flaubert, Lewis Carroll, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, all of whom,...
Wasn’t education a matter of infusing one’s life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?
When Pang was barely out of toddlerhood, she zoomed in and out of the apartment unsupervised, playing with plastic bags and, on occasion, with a large butcher knife.