I have loved works of fiction precisely for their illusions, for the author’s sleight-of-hand in showing me the magic, what appeared in the right hand but not in the left...
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don’t have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.
With each passing day, I didn’t lose hope. I fought to have more.
Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.
Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?
I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.
I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
Who knows where inspiration comes from. Perhaps it arises from desperation. Perhaps it comes from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muses.
In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
Dementia was like a truth serum.
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.
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.
I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didnt always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.
But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter. -Ying Ying.
We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.
To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing. -Jing-mei.
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.
I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.