23 Quotes by Monique Truong

When I heard or said the word "Kelly," I tasted canned peaches, delicious and candy-sweet. This, however, was the first time I had ever heard anyone say "Powell." The word was a raw onion, a playground bully with sharp elbows shoving all flavors aside. Luckily for our friendship, little girls didn't often call each other by their full names.

Words, do not have twins in every language. Sometimes they only have distant cousins, and sometimes they pretend that they are not even related.

The irony of acquiring a foreign tongue is that I have amassed just enough cheap, serviceable words to fuel my desires and never, never enough lavish, impudent ones to feed them.

Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys.

I had forgotten how different my language looks on paper, that its letters have so little resemblance to how they actually sound. Words, most I had not spoken for years, generously gave themselves to me. Fluency, after all, is relative. On that sheet of paper, on another side of the globe, I am fluent.

He wrote that it would have been better for me to hear it all in person. What he meant was that paper was not strong enough to bear the weight of what he had to say but that he would have to test its strength anyway.

Though contrary to what the Old Man would have me believe, the vocabulary of servitude is not built upon my knowledge of foreign words but rather on my ability to swallow them.

We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves.

And so, like a courtesan, forced to perform the dance of the seven veils, I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissue that forms the bulk of who I am.