Lisa See Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.
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While she is lovely, we need to remember that her face is not what distinguishes her. Her beauty is a reflection of the virtue and talent she keeps inside.
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Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.
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In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.
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Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.
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I’ve never thought much about whether I was happy or if I had fun as a child. I was a so-so girl who lived with a so-so family in a so-so village. I didn’t know that there might be another way to live, and I didn’t worry about it either.
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I didn't know you would be here last night, but you were. We can't fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.
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What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
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When the sun is shining, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above. Page 279
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Don't ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.
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Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts,or emotions.
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A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.
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You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.
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Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.
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I know a lot about women and their suffering, but I still know almost nothing about men.
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Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.
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In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.
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For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me — as a girl and later as a woman — to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.
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One of the things that's pretty unique about nu shu, when you look especially at these old letters and stories that have been saved, is that there are certain lines that are very standard that are used again and again. It's almost like a formula in a sense, so that these certain lines come up again and again.
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All women on earth-- and men, too for that matter-- hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, & gives us the courage to survive our little deaths: the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs.
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And one of the interesting things about bound feet is that they never age.
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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