Quotes from Lisa See

You have special abilities," she goes on. "I don't mean you are a witch or a fox spirit. And you've never seemed drawn to the special gift of healing or magic. Rather, you are like A-ma Mata, who gave birth to the Akha people, who pushed against her restraints, who said, 'No, I will not accept my bad fate,' and who endured against all odds with her intelligence, compassion, and perseverance. All that comes from this grove. And the mother tree." A-ma

As I speak, I'm reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

We were to be like long vines with entwined roots, like trees that stand a thousand years, like a pair of mandarin ducks mated for life

How can I help change things if I sit by and do nothing?

Every passing moment is the passing of life; every moment of life is life itself.

When you're held underwater, you think only of air.

To learn a different language is to learn a different way of living

Everyone knows that part of the spirit descends to the afterworld, while part of it remains with the family, but we have a special belief about the spirit of a young woman who has died before her marriage that goes contrary to this. She comes back to prey upon other unmarried girls--not to scare them but to take them to the afterworld with her so she might have company.

Dreamers are born to be disappointed.

You may not know this, but the cold-water stress that the haenyeo endure is greater than for any other human group in the world.

Women live quietly, I said. However angry or broken a woman might get, she does not think about beating someone, does she?

When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I've seen traces of her in my face in the mirror. My mother. My a-ma.

Suffering has brought clarity into my life. Maybe the things that have happened to me are punishment for what I did in a previous life, maybe they were fate or destiny, and maybe they're all just part of a natural cycle - like the short but spectacular lives of cherry blossoms in spring or leaves falling away in autumn.

Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back," she warned the gathering. "In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.

If you try to live, you can live on well.

That I had been shallow, stubborn, and selfish did not alter the gravity and stupidity of what I had done. I had made the greatest mistake for a woman literate in nu shu: I had not considered texture, context, and shades of meaning.

But why bother trying to turn a monkey into a goat?

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 writing is soaked with the tears of my heart, An invisible rebellion that no man can see. Let our life stories become tragic art. Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me.

all girls have dreams, even if our destinies are set.

Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After

Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.

You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.

maybe writing doesn't require sacrifice. Maybe it's a gift to experience emotions through our brushes, ink, and paper. I wrote out sorrow, fear, and hate. You wrote desire, joy, and love. We paid a heavy price for speaking our minds, for revealing our hearts, for trying to create, but it was worth it, wasn't it, daughter?