And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
What do you think was the very first sound to become a word, a meaning?′... And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother’s breast. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.
The only thing certain in times of great uncertainty is that people will behave with great strength or weakness, and with very little else in between.
If you don’t take a chance, someone else will give you his luck. And if you get bad luck, then you need to take another chance to turn things from bad to good.
How can you blame a person for his fears and weaknesses unless you have felt the same and done differently? How can you think everyone can be a hero, choosing death, when it is part of our nature to let go of brave thoughts at the last moment and cling to hope and life?
Do you know what morals are Violet? They’re other people’s rules. Do you know what a conscience is? Freedom to use your own intelligence to determine what is right or wrong. You possess that freedom and no one can remove it from you.
You are beauty, we are beauty, we are divine, unchanged by time.
Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.
The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.
Teddy once told me that it’s natural that we feel alone, and that’s because our hearts are different from others and we don’t even know how. When we’re in love, as if by magic, our different hearts come together perfectly toward the same desire. Eventually, the differences return, and then comes heartache and mending, and, in between, much loneliness and fear. If love remains despite the pain of those differences, it must be guarded as rare...
And all that talk about the breakup being good for us- who am I trying to fool? I’m cut loose, untethered, not belonging to anything or anybody.
Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.
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.
Maybe the kind of love that would comfort me did not exist. Perhaps I expected too much of love and no one existed who could ever meet my unceasing and bottomless need for it.
These days I realize that faith and fate have similar effects on the believer. They suggest that a higher power knows the next move and that we are at the mercy of that force. They differ, among other things, in how you try to cull beneficence and what you do to avoid disaster.
How can I argue with someone who makes no sense?
I read to escape to a more interesting world, not to be locked up in a sweltering prison and find myself vicariously standing among people who are tortured beyond the limits of sanity.
This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies – the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shanghai. That’s like thinking someone from San Francisco wears a cowboy hat and rides a horse. Ridiculous!
A moment is not the same as time.
I am a miserable cook but an extremely talented eater.