4 stars

This book was a beautiful exploration of college life, assimilation, and mostly, friendship.

stay true - hua hsu:
* That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us. (21%)
* Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another’s lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity. When you’re nineteen or twenty, your life is governed by debts and favors, promises to pic up the check or drive next time around. We built our lives into a set of mutual agreements, a string of small gifts lobbed back and forth. Life happened within that delay. (52%)
* Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would “choose knowing rather than being known.” I had always thought it was the other way around.
* The intimacy of friendship, he wrote, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. This isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship, he writes, “one must love the future…Maybe taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship, signaling the possibility of a eulogy that doesn’t simply focus attention back on the survivor and their grief.
* There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect. Maybe your lifelong fascination with harmony finally begins to make sense in those scenes, packed in your family’s station wagon, singing along to “God Only Knows,” waiting int he parking lot until the song was over. Aristotle remarked that friendships among the young always orbit the possibility of pleasure.
* We learn as children that friendship is casual and transient. As a structure, it’s rife with imbalance, invisible tiers, pettiness, and insecurity, stretches when we simply disappear. For some, friendship needs to be steady and rhythmic. For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left dormant for years.
* There were people in our dorm I wanted to befriend, where the inertia of proximity, I was certain, would one day result in closeness. I’d find an empty seat in the dining hall and admire your thrift shop t-shirt, your ironic pin; maybe we’d start going to see bands together. Perhaps wee would cross paths in the foreign section of the video store; I would stay up late, listening to your problems, and then I’d share my secrets in return.
* Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The idea was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.
* Mostly, I became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward. I picked up a pen and tried to write myself back into the past.