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Book: Bitter in the Mouth
Quotes of Book: Bitter in the Mouth

Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
We were forgiving each other for who we were, for how we came into this world, for how we changed or didn't change for each other.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
She laughed that sharp, quick laugh that smart girls all had, until they found out that the sound of brilliance flashing made boys nervous. Most of these girls, Kelly included, then adopted that slow, bubbling giggle that put boys at ease.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
Such a "match," even if identified, would only allow me the illusion of communication and you the illusion of understanding. I could claim, for example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we all haven't tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feed not so alone in the world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to one another, "I know exactly what you mean!
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
The truth about my family was that we disappointed one another. When I heard the word 'disappoint,' I tasted toast, slightly burned. But when I saw the word written, I thought of it first and foremost as the combining or the collapsing together of the words 'disappear' and 'point,' as in how something in us ceased to exist the moment someone let us down. Small children understood this better than adults, this irreparable diminution of the self that occurred at each instance, large and small, of someone forgetting a promise, arriving late, losing interest, leaving too soon, and otherwise making us feel like a fool. That was why children, in the face of disappointments, large and small, were so quick to cry and scream, often throwing their bodies to the ground as if their tiny limbs were on fire. That was a good instinct. We, the adults or the survivors of our youth, traded in instinct for a societal norm. We stayed calm. We swallowed the hurt. We forgave the infraction. We ignored that our skin was on fire. We became our own fools. Sometimes, when we were very successful, we forgot entirely the memory of the disappointment. The loss that resulted, of course, could not be undone. What was gone was gone. We just could no longer remember how we ended up with so much less of our selves. Why we expected nothing, why we deserved so little, and why we brought strangers into our lives to fill the void.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
We loved our opposites so that we could free ourselves from our selves.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
Seconds before, we were a boy and a girl standing next to each other. The distance between our bodies was out of habit and not out of lack of curiosity. His movement was swift and unexpected. I remembered the smell of his clothes--his mom, like mine, must have used Tide--as the first of the atmospheric changes. The second was the instant warming of the air temperature as his breath came near. The third was that it became suddenly dark. As Wade pulled away, he said my name aloud for no one but himself.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
After a week's worth of failed fairy tales-stories that made my eyelids flutter open and not shut-my father tried telling me stories that belonged only to him. Thomas told me of an island off the coast of a different world. On this island, there stood a city whose buildings were made of glass. He told me that at the heart of this city was a forest with trees, ponds and a lake, swans and horses, and even a small castle. He told me that the streets of the city were filled with bright yellow cars that you hopped in and out of at will and that would take you wherever you wanted to go. In this city, there were sidewalks overflowing with people from the whole world over who wanted so much to be . He told me of its neighborhoods, with names like Greenwich Village and Harlem and Chinatown. At the nucleus of these stories was my father, and spinning around him was the city of New York. Long before I would see them in photographs or in real life, my father had given me the white crown lights of the Chrysler Building and the shining needle of the Empire State.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
As a father, he was generous. More or less. The "less" was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver's desire and fulfillment played an important role.
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Monique Truong _ Bitter in the Mouth
WE all need a story of where we came from and how we got here.
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