Quotes from Lisa See

You should be more careful out there," the doctor says. "You have a dangerous job. I mean, do you see men doing it?" "Of course not!" Young-sook exclaims. "The world knows that the cold water will cause their penises to shrivel and die." The doctor shakes her head and laughs.

You aren't aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain.

A monument will never change how she feels. It's unfair that victims should have to forgive those who raped, tortured, and killed, or burned villages to the ground. On an Island of World Peace, shouldn't those who inflicted terrible harm on others be forced to confess and atone, and not make widows and mothers pay for stone monuments?

What better place to look for trash than in America - the land of consumption and waste?

I was a haenyeo—independent and resilient—but I'd missed my husband.

You cannot refuse to eat just because there's a chance of being choked.

Although I can't possibly have a single memory of this place. Then, from deep within me, a profound sense of love radiating out to everything around me complemented by reciprocal waves of love coming at me, enveloping me. All

Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete...

But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you'll go, in what you'll accept, and pretty soon you're at the bottom

it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother's love.

Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you find peace. I wrap, I bind, but you will have the reward.

If you work hard, you will eat easy. If you work easy, you will eat hard.

You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.

As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.

It's fair to say I don't know what I'm doing. I like to plot my life and proceed carefully, but life doesn't always follow a plan.

These are universals, as is the fear women feel during times of political upheaval that occur in what could still be called the outside world of men--whether during the Taiping Rebellion so many years ago or today for women in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sudan, or even right here in this country in the post-9/11 era. On the surface, we as American women are independent, free, and mobile, but at our cores we still long for love, friendship, happiness, tranquility, and to be heard.

I have inherited fragrance of classic books. Drilling the wall for light, hair tied to a beam in fear of drowsing, I wrest from nature excellence in letters.

When the string breaks while working, there is still the rope. When the oars wear out, there is still the tree, she recited. You feel you can't go on, but you will.

I focus my eyes on my jade bracelet. All these years and for all the years after I die, it will remain unchanged. It will always be hard and cold- just a piece of stone. Yet for me it is an object that ties me to the past, to people and places that are gone forever. Its continued perfection serves as a physical reminder to keep living, to look to the future, to cherish what I have. It reminds me to endure. I'll live one morning after another.

No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.

If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty.

You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

No matter what you're feeling or how desperate you become, always take a moral position. If you do that, God will watch over you.

Every pandemic in the history of the world has come from China.