Lisa See Quotes - Page 3

I write a thousand words a day.

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.

Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn't know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but its unaware of the boy who's come into the garden with a net. Three creatures—the cicada, the mantis and the oriole—all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.

The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.

Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.

People write to me all the time, and I write back.

It used to happen in villages and towns in China that they would have - I guess you'd call them beauty contests - where all of the women of a particular village or town would be seated behind these screens or curtains with only their feet showing.

I think all women have a friend who at some point dumped them or betrayed them or deeply disappointed them. And at the same time all women have a friend who they dumped or betrayed or hurt in some way. That's universal in women's friendships.

I think to really be literate in nu shu you only need about 600 characters because it is phonetic. So you're able to then create many words out of one character.

I don't really know anything about the movie business, even though I've lived in Los Angeles my whole life - somehow I've never bumped into it.

I love research. I'd go so far as to say I'm a research fanatic.

She loves you. She's just forgotten how to show it.

Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.

Perhaps he was afraid as I was that we'd be caught. Or perhaps he was breathing me in just as I was letting him come into my lungs, my eyes, my heart.

Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love. From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love. Peony in Love

All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality.

But there are certain books I would never put on a Kindle because you want to be able to look at graphs and photos or the footnotes and maps. You can't see that.

I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.

I think sometimes as an adult, you take people for what they do, and what they are now, instead of the whole picture of their lives.