Every passing moment is the passing of life; every moment of life is life itself.
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.
How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments.
One day – and it only takes one moment to change your life forever –.
If you try to live, you can live on well.
The sea, it is said, is like a mother. The salt water, the pulse and surges of the current, the magnified beat of your heart, and the muffled sounds reverberating through the water together recall the womb.
To see Sow Flower’s mother eat that meat was something I’ll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less that a cultivated woman.
To us, she was like a rare bird that had escaped its cage and was roaming through a courtyard of common chickens.
All things not at peace will cry out.
It was easier for me to begin picking at Snow Flower’s faults than to feel the emotions raging inside of me.
When you lose your home country, what do you preserve and what do you abandon?
If you work hard, you will eat easy. If you work easy, you will eat hard.
You can’t learn about living unless you live. You can’t live unless you take a chance; and your living is limited by the chances you take.
No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.
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?
When you do things in a soft way, you make the other people believe they’ve thought up something to do for you, when actually you’re directing them.” Later, Ruth.
People are shaped by the earth and water around them.
Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.
Deep love-true-heart love-must grow. Back then I didn’t yet understand the burning kind of love, so instead I thought about the rice paddies I used to see on my daily walks down to the river with my brother when I still had all my milk teeth. Maybe I could make our love grow like a farmer made his crop to grow-through hard work, unwavering will, and the blessings of nature. How funny that I can remember that even now! Waaa! I knew so little about life, but I knew enough to think like a farmer.