Quotes from Lisa See

I know I'm the most precious person in my family, but I wasn't precious enough for my birth family to keep me as their one child.

She's grabbed onto old traditions-outdated traditions- in the same way I latch onto them now: as a means of survival, as a way to hang on to ghost memories.

They did this to me. They did that to me.' A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You're being punished by your anger.

My home is here with this family I've built from scraps of tragedy.

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me – as a girl and later as a woman – to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

Las haenyeo somos fuertes y nunca habíamos pedido ayuda para cargar peso.

No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one

Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming -- weren't our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?

My heart is empty & my life has no value anymore. Each moment a thousand tears.

There is no life without death. That is the true meaning of yin and yang

The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.

Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.

I don't really know anything about the movie business, even though I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life - somehow I've never bumped into it.

I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you're able to then create many words out of one character.

I write a thousand words a day.

People come in and out of our lives, and the true test of friendship is whether you can pick back up right where you left off the last time you saw each other.

My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.

People write to me all the time, and I write back.

When the sun is shining, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above. Page 279

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.

When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love

Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.