If I stopped running and stood still, I would be accepting that what I had was all I would ever have. And then I would no longer be lost, because there would nowhere else to go.
The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! – it is too beautiful to eat.
Later they will remember those moments with you. But they are not memories of you, but the feeling they were immortal because you made them gods.
The Doppler Effect of Communication”: There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. “The Centrifugal Force of Arguments”: The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.
By my father’s own handwritten definition: “Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.
I often reread passages of “Lolita” for its exquisite language. To me, “Lolita” has no message, no purpose, other than to exist as a marvel of literary creation. It has wit, intelligence and style. It pointedly makes no attempt to serve a higher moral purpose, and previous attempts by critics to find one have proven ludicrous. The annotated edition is accompanied by a brilliant afterword by Nabokov that is a lucid reminder of the pure joy of writing, its interplay with life.
In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations.
I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptic’s rationale of relying on proof through fact.
This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Beacuse sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.
The East is where things begin, my mother once told me, the direction from which the sun rises, where the wind comes from.
When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they’re feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.
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.
I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust.
But whenever Wen Fu began to shout, she always cried, cried all night long, and would not stop until I told her more lies. “Yiku, be good, and your life will be good too.” How could I know that this is how a mother teaches her daughter to be afraid?
The moment is altered as soon as I try to capture it, so for me, it’s impossible.” How true, I thought. Moments are gone as soon as you think about them.
Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back.
It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable.
I also found out why I should never reveal the “why” to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it’s all diminishing returns after a certain age.
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.