Anh Pham

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on the atlas — 35

highlights — 16

"You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all."
gracenguyen.ca/montreal
Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
"Failures of Kindness" by George Saunders speech transcript
I saw a Tiktok the other day that made me tear up. It was about how we can still root for people who are no longer in our lives. Like most, I have people I don’t talk to anymore whom I used to be very close with. Some of them I dated. Some of them are friends where the friendship became too thorny or too complicated or too sad. I still think about them a lot. In so many ways their fingerprints are all over me. To be loved is to be changed. I like the idea that love sometimes means supporting someone from a distance. That their happiness can still be my happiness. When I think about the people …
bookbear express | Ava | Substack
Others will always be smarter; but there are always ways to position yourself better regardless. Either you do an overlap of two things really well, or you are in domain X but care about and do unusual thing Y that really accelerates you or whatever I can be creative enough to come up with great things I can do
Conviction is the Scarcest Resource: Dialogues About Conviction
despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
And I thought about that. What if literature, my participation in it — that’s my field, if you will — what if the poem, the story, the novel, at its best can serve as a fire escape? Because on the page, you don’t have the awkward reality of a body bumping into someone in the supermarket. You don’t have to say, How ‘bout them Patriots? You don’t have to talk about the weather. You can go right in, deep. And I really have been — it changed the way I thought about writing and literature, in that if we have the fire escape as a reality in our buildings, what does it look like in the reality of our…
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
And I think we’ve built shame into vulnerability, and we’ve sealed it off in our culture — Not at the table, not at the dinner table, don’t say this here, don’t say that there, don’t talk about this, this is not cocktail conversation, what have you. We police access to ourselves. And the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet still not know who they are. Our “how are you” has failed us. And we have to find something else.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
And in this sense, having the words in the air — I feel like the voice in the air is like a second page, the way you can articulate — the pauses, the cadences. I learned this, mostly, from watching Whitney Houston. If you listen to Whitney Houston’s songs, they start like a whisper. And then how do we get to the pinnacles, the bright-lit room of her peaks? But the power and the mastery in her performance is the oscillation, and the respect of how a word, which is static on the page, can be lifted and amplified through using the whole range of human emotion in the voice. So I’m an apprentice of…
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
But I think all religions have this — outside of all of the orthodoxy and the rigor of ceremonies, at the center of it is trying to remind us that we will die, and how do we live a life worthwhile of our breath? And I think thinking about death and thinking about what we do towards it, around it, helps me center myself in such a chaotic space. And I do think it’s part of my own nurturing of my own mental health.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
And to me, that’s what language is: the glass. You think it’s fixed. You think it’s clear pane of glass. But in fact, through years, it starts to drip and melt and change.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
what happens is that through the body and through service, you articulate it through paying attention. Nothing can say “I love you” more than feeling it from somebody. And I think this relationship is how I started to see words. I looked at them as if they were things I could move and care for.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
And when you think about how people tell stories, stories are carried in the body, and it’s edited each time the person tells it. And so what you have, by the time someone tells a story, is a masterclass of form, technique, concision, imagery — even how to pause, which you don’t really get on the page. Arguably you do in poetry, with the line break. And this is what these women were giving me. I didn’t know how valuable that gift was.
Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath | The On Being Project
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside. We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to prete…
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming | Neil Gaiman | The Guardian
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing. We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming | Neil Gaiman | The Guardian
I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do.
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming | Neil Gaiman | The Guardian
What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
Curius / Onboarding