Hue Quotes

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

In this peaceful city, during Tet, it was traditional to send cups of paper with lit candles floating down the Huong like flickering blossoms, prayers for health, for success, for the memory of loved ones away or departed, for success in business or in love, and perhaps for an end to the war and killing. It made a moving collective display, a vast flotilla of hope, many thousands of tiny flames. They would wind down the wide water without sound, flowing past the bright lights of the modern city to the south, framed to the north by the fortress’s high black walls. People would line both banks of the Huong to savor the spectacle, stepping up and bending to add their own offering. The ritual was Hue’s emblem and signature, a gesture of beauty and calm, of harmony between the living and the dead, an expression of Vietnam’s soul, a place far from the horrors of war. Not this year.

Debating societies had pondered long and hard over the "Oz question," and published many scholarly tracts within the pages of Spectrum. But while remnants of Tin Men had been unearthed by salvage teams, and Emerald City still existed as the center of learning and administration, no physical evidence of brick roads had ever been found anywhere in the Collective, either of natural or synthetic hue--and naturalists had long ago rejected the possibility that monkeys could fly to Oz. Oz, it was generally agreed, had been a fiction, and a fairly odd one.