The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A promise is a promise, yet, in the end, it is only that.” (Afterparties Quotes)
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Back in my own apartment, I lay in my bed, surrounded by stacks of dusty books from college. All these classic stories and groundbreaking theories I was too lazy to throw out or even organize. The next big earthquake—, even a door slammed too hard—would’ve buried me in a mountain of recorded thought no one gave a shit about anymore.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Ben laughed. He was intent on finding the underbelly of positivity lurking beneath everything I said. “How do you not have a boyfriend?” “Boys can’t handle me,” I said flippantly. He smiled in response, and part of me felt tender, too much so, my insides exposed to the air. I had the perverse desire to test the limits of his optimism.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Dad was one of those guys who smiled and laughed constantly, but never without a sad look in his eyes. I’d realized this about him shortly after graduating.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Here I was! Living in a district that echoed a dead San Francisco. Gay, Cambodian, and not even twenty-six, carrying in my body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism. And yet, my task was to teach kids a decade younger, existing across an oceanic difference, what it meant to be human. How absurd, I admitted. How hilarious. I was actually excited.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“I thought about what I wanted to do now — if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd. Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“I thought of my sister, how she always knew exactly what she wanted at any given moment, down to a disturbing power to order off menus perfectly, and how I’d always been swept into her hunger for life.” (Afterparties Quotes)
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Looking at your visibly sticky mouth, I thought about Michael Jackson again, the absurdity of his photo jolting our day into being, how the more he tried to change to reinvent himself into something completely new, the more he seemed horrifically burdened by what he used to be.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Maybe the younger you are, the more dying seems unexceptional. What’s the difference between birth and death, anyway? Aren’t they just the opening and closing of worlds?”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Paul strolled over from the food court, projecting that casual angst peculiar to guys who never left our hometown, who stayed committed to a dusty California free of ambition or beaches.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Seeing a sloppy wet penis enter a sloppy wet vagina, from above, going in and out with the practiced tempo of professionals, strikes me as yet another drama for the ages I am meant only to witness, rather than learn from, like the Olympics or presidential debates.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Tevy wonders if her mother has ever loved someone romantically, if her mother is even capable of reaching beyond the realm of survival, if her mother has ever been granted any freedom from worry, and if her mother’s present carries the ability to dilate, for even a brief moment, into its own plane of suspended existence, separate from past or future.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“The dream unfolds: Somaly and I are sitting at a dinner table. She wears a white sampot covered in jewels perfectly matching her necklace. She’s almost akin to an apsara in a painting—aggressively elegant, like at any second, she’ll bend her hands backward to her wrists, and sway.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“The last thing I want is to feel the frustration, the frivolous torment, of being around a person who can’t see past her own suffering.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“They imagined a future severed from their past mistakes, the history they inherited, a world in which—with no questions asked, no hesitation felt—they completed the simple actions they thought, discussed, and dreamed.” (Afterparties Quotes)
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
“Two people who knew how to cook wouldn’t marry, because that would be, like, a waste. If one person in the marriage cooked, then the other person should know how to sell food. He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliance sin order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win, because the genocide was the best training he could’ve got.”
Anthony Veasna So
Afterparties
