If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.
too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.
We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.
Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming – well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate. Isn’t that true?
Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
I had thus learned to push down my feelings, to force myself to not care, to do nothing and let things happen, come what may.
Why would any writer in her right mind ever consider making a movie instead? That’s like going from being a monk or a nun to serving as a camp counselor for hundreds of problem children.
When a husband stops paying attention to the garden, he’s thinking of pulling up roots.
When the anesthesia of love wears off,you suffer the pain of consequence.
I now lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it.
Only you pick that crab. Nobody else take it. I already know this. Everyone else want best quality. You thinking different.
Believe me, daughter, there is nothing worse than having your own family member out for revenge.
You can’t stay in the dark for too long. Something inside you starts to fade, and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.
But you can’t stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.
After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?
A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he’s just another bird drinking from your misery.
Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.
…and it’s ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus’s dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.
Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.
What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.
No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
He simply translated what was in LuLing’s heart: her better intentions, her hopes.
It’s a luxury being a writer because all you ever think about is life.
…I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep beating those strong wings and fly in my own slice of wind
It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness,” she said, “only it was not happy and it was worse than fake. It was dangerous
I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.
The best life you can have as you get into old age is good food, good teeth to eat it with, and few worries when you go to bed at night.
That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.
Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.
Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.
I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
Maybe all Americans who suffer from melancholy act as if they have gone mad. But I truly thought he might throw himself in the river, and I don’t want his ghost visiting to keep telling me he’s sorry.
What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded.
Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.
Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.
how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?
A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.
If I look upon my whole life, I cannot think of another time when I felt more comfortable: when I had no worries, fears, or desires, when my life seemed as soft and lovely as lying inside a cocoon of rose silk.
Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls
Whenever I’m with my [teenager] I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines.
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
If you can’t change your fate change your attitude.
I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.
Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.
No one can travel your own road for you you must travel it for yourself. My faith in this stems from my childhood. I grew up in a family with a system of religious beliefs handed down to me.
I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.