Top highlights from Our Missing Hearts
Why did I tell you so many stories? Because I wanted the world to make sense to you. I wanted to make sense of the world, for you. I wanted the world to make sense.
Show this quote
it seemed the sanest and most logical course: if the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.
Show this quote
Librarians, of all people, understood the value of knowing, even if that information could not yet be used.
Show this quote
He wonders who decided which books were too dangerous to keep, and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner, ferrying them to their doom. He wonders if it is his father.
Show this quote
We dont burn our books, she says. We pulp them. Much more civilized, right? Mash them up, recycle them into toilet paper. Those books wiped someones rear end a long time ago.
Show this quote
If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly.
Show this quote
Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?
Show this quote
Beautiful women. The world, at that time, was full of them, all of them furiously incandescent like dying stars.
Show this quote
For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.
Show this quote
Too unpatriotic, right, to tell you the horrible things our countrys done before. The camps at Manzanar, or what happens at the border. They probably teach you that most plantation owners were kind to their slaves and that Columbus discovered America, dont they?
Show this quote
bring back our missing hearts.
Show this quote
When does she stop speaking? When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. Who ever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?
Show this quote
breathing in the peculiar smell of the library: a mix of dust and leather and melted vanilla ice cream. Warm, like the scent of someones skin.
Show this quote
With one finger he tips it from the shelf. The Boy Who Drew Cats: A Japanese Folktale. Hes never seen this particular book before, but as soon as he sees the cover he knows its the same story. A Japanese folktale
Show this quote
And we need their generosity to keep this place open. Or, just as likely, someone got nervous and got rid of it preemptively. Us public libraries--a lot of us just can't take the risk.
Show this quote
No sign of her anywhere here. Signs of her everywhere here.
Show this quote
theres one thing he remembers from stories, its that people who offer help along your waywhether directing you to treasure or warning you of dangershould not be ignored.
Show this quote
Somewhere out there, you knew, wealthy people were barricaded in their fortresses, fed and warm, if not happy, but soon you stopped thinking of them. You stopped thinking about other people at all.
Show this quote
The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves.
Show this quote
Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To
Show this quote
Bird laughs. For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.
Show this quote
So you banned all those books, Sadie said, and the teacher had blinked twice at her over her glasses. Oh no, sweetie, she said. People think that sometimes, but no. No one bans anything. Havent you ever heard of the Bill of Rights? The class giggled, and Sadie flushed. Every school makes its own independent judgments, the teacher said.
Show this quote
Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else's children though she'd left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.
Show this quote
PACT protects innocent children from being indoctrinated with false, subversive, un-American ideas by unfit and unpatriotic parents. He taps the paper.
Show this quote
rainbow of different, beautiful lies. But now, seeing the picture
Show this quote
It happened so slowly that you might not even notice it at all, like the sky turning from dusk to dark.
Show this quote
Turning your energy toward whats to come, leaning into the light.When you were born, your father wanted you to have my name. Miu: a seedling. He liked that idea, you as our little sprout. But I chose his: Gardner. One who makes things grow. I wanted you to be not only the grown, but the grower. To have power over your own life, turning your energy toward whats to come, leaning into the light.
Show this quote
The letter arrives on a Friday.I would like that, very much.
Show this quote
They seemed so bare, so empty. Like a face without features. He
Show this quote
But PACT is more than a law. Its a promise we make to each other: a promise to protect our American ideals and values; a promise that for people who weaken our country with un-American ideas, there will be consequences. from Lets Learn About PACT: A Guide for Young Patriots
Show this quote
He wants the old man to deliver a biting comeback, he wants the old man to punch the pizza guy in his smirking face, he wants the old man to back away before the pizza guy saysor doessomething worse. Before he lifts those hands that pound and flatten thick dough into compliance. The moment tautens and tightens,
Show this quote
Grace Lee
Show this quote
Succulents would grow anew from a broken-off leaf, pushing roots out into the air, then down into the soil: a piece of its own body, transformed into its child.
Show this quote
In Austin, outside the governors mansion: a giant concrete cube with a crack running down the center, a crowbar by its side. Etched into the cube, four chiseled letters: P A C T. Etched into the crowbar: our missing hearts. One by one, passersby picked up the bar and hefted it, but no one dared swing, and when the police arrived theyd confiscated it as a dangerous weapon. The cube they loaded onto a flatbed and hauled away.
Show this quote
There is no snow, yet, to hold footprints, and in a moment, as his father disappears from sight, it is as if he never passed that way at all. Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence. To have no one remember you'd been there.
Show this quote
For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the effable effable, how they could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.
Show this quote
A whole stack of them, lined with the stories of others, all with their own memories and regrets, all their failings and love, all things they wished they could tell the children they might never see again. Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.
Show this quote
She pulled the shell of a cicada from a pine trees trunk, turned it over to show the neat slit down the belly where, having grown, it had wriggled out of its old self into something new. And she told him stories. Stories about warriors and princesses, poor brave girls and boys, monsters and magicians. The brother and sister who outwitted the witch and found their way home. The girl who saved her swan-brothers from enchantment. Ancient myths that made sense of the world: why sunflowers nod, why echoes linger, why spiders spin. Stories her mother had told her in childhood, before she stopped speaking of such things: how once there had been nine suns, baking the earth to dust, until a brave archer shot them one by one out of the sky. How the monkey king tricked his way into the heavenly garden to steal the peaches of immortality. How once a year, two lovers, forever separated, crossed a river of stars to meet in midair.
Show this quote
Every school makes its own independent judgments, the teacher said. About which books are useful to their students and which books might expose them to dangerous ideas. Let me ask you something: Whose parents want them to spend time with bad people?
Show this quote
And some people chide her for coming too late. One older womana Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been takenlooked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth.
Show this quote
was the same dirty tint that would be used, for years to come, to justify the sidelong glances at anyone who might seem Chinese, to excuse the refusals of service and shouted slurs and spat-in faces, and later on, the baseball bats, the booted feet.
Show this quote
the world was on fire, you might as well burn bright. Late nights
Show this quote
The knitted web in the Common is based on various pacifist yarn-bombings around the U.S. and the U.K., while the ice children in Nashville have their seeds in the surprise overnight installations of statues, such as the nude Donald Trump statues created by INDECLINE to protest his policies, and the haunting depictions of caged children that were planted by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to draw attention to migrant family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Show this quote
Facebook group using the hashtag #ourmissinghearts, dedicated to raising awareness about missing persons. Im grateful for the work they do in trying to bring peace to families hoping for answers.
Show this quote
The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves. As if any of this might be justified by careful distinguishing on the part of the one wielding the bat.
Show this quote
Because telling you what really happened would be espousing un-American views, and we certainly wouldnt want that.
Show this quote
There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.
Show this quote
if theres one thing he remembers from stories, its that people who offer help along your waywhether directing you to treasure or warning you of dangershould not be ignored.
Show this quote
Maybe, she thinks, this is simply what living is: an infinite list of transgressions that did not weigh against the joys but that simply overlaid them, the two lists mingling and merging, all the small moments that made up the mosaic of a person, a relationship, a life.
Show this quote
And how much of a difference can it make really, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy worlda world moving so quickly that voices and sounds Doppler into a rising whine, so distracted that even when your attention snags on the burr of something unusual, you are dragged away before you can see it, uprooting it like a bees spent stinger. It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring, just these words, just this thing that happened once to one person that the listener does not and will never know. It is just a story. It is only words. She does not know
Show this quote
As he walks, a smattering of memories flare at each step, small bright stones lighting a path through the forest. There is the
Show this quote
Behind them, empty bookshelves. Bird has never seen books on them, but there they stand, fossils of a long-gone era.
Show this quote
About which books are useful to their students and which books might expose them to dangerous ideas. Let me ask you something: Whose parents want them to spend time with bad people?
Show this quote
The few remaining books are small dark spots against all that bare. The China-Korean Axis and the New Cold War. The Menace at Home. The End of America: China on the Rise.
Show this quote
immense and shocking potential.
Show this quote
And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environmentsthe definition of which was ever expanding: Appearing sympathetic to China. Appearing insufficiently anti-China. Having any doubts about anything American; having any ties to China at allno matter how many generations past.
Show this quote
chuckle, a loud, insincere whinny that gallops around the room and then vanishes.
Show this quote
world without PACT; it is as axiomatic as gravity, or Thou shalt not kill. He didnt understand
Show this quote
What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society.
Show this quote
And finally, most crucially: preventing the spread of un-American views by quietly removing children from un-American environmentsthe definition of which was ever expanding: Appearing sympathetic to China. Appearing insufficiently anti-China. Having any doubts about anything American; having any ties to China at allno matter how many generations past. Questioning whether China was really the problem; questioning whether PACT was being applied fairly; eventually, questioning PACT itself.
Show this quote
