Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
I measured my success by how many clients I had and how many billable hours I had.
I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
If I now recognize evil in other people, is it not because I have become evil too?
Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.
That was how dishonesty and betrayal started, not in big lies but in small secrets.
I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.
I don't steer clear of genres. I simply haven't steered myself toward some of them.
Those who don't heed the warnings don't live to admit they were stupid not to do so.
Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.
You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them.
Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with
Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.
You can have pride in what you do each day, but not arrogance in what you were born with.
I began to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.
We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me.
Whenever I'm with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei
I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength..."strongest wind cannot be seen."
Now I was a tiger that neither pounced nor lay waiting between the trees. I became an unseen spirit.
And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.
You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei
And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood.
It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.
But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying
Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?
If she doesn't speak, she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever. -An-mei
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.
How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently?
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.
Secrets are kept from children, a lid on top of the soup kettle, so they do not boil over with too much truth.
I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control.
In the mid-1800s, they were known also as 'singsong houses,' and the courtesans were actually master musicians.
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.
Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.
how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?
Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.
My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.
Only two kinds of daughters, she shouted in Chinese. Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!
Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don't you learn to play chess." - Ch. 5