Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Lisa See
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Lisa See.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
I write a thousand words a day.
And one of the interesting things about bound feet is that they never age.
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.
A book is one kind of an art form and a film is a different art form. I think as a writer you just have to say, well the book is one thing, and the film is a completely different one.
People write to me all the time, and I write back.
I am an eighth Chinese, and I come from a large Chinese-American family in Los Angeles.
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.
But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that's when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.
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.
Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.
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.
My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.
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.
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.
People come in and out of our lives, and the true test of friendship is whether you can pick back up right where you left off the last time you saw each other.
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.
I write what I'm interested in.
I love research. I'd go so far as to say I'm a research fanatic.
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.
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.
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.
May and I are sisters. We'll always fight, but we'll always make up as well. That's what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other's frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we've had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.
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.
How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?
Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming -- weren't our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?
Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it's your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.
When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.
You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.
Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.
When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love
A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.
I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That's the meaning of fate.
i would rather be married to broken jade than flawless clay
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.
Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.
My love for him had never gone away but only changed, growing deeper like wine fermenting or pickles curing. It bore into me with the pervasiveness of water working its way to the center of a mountain.
People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.
Don't ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.
I've come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world.
I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.
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.
There is no life without death. That is the true meaning of yin and yang
We're told that men are strong & brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat & bear physical & mental agony much better than men.
Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.
Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints -- that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.
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.
You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.
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.
When you don’t have much, having less isn’t so bad.
Let those who believe, believe. Let those who doubt, doubt.
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
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.
I am still learning about love. I thought I understood it--not just mother love, but the love for one's parents, for one's husband, and for one's laotong. I've experienced the other types of love--pity love, respectful love and gratitude love. But looking at our secret fan with its messages written between Snow Flower and me over many years, I see that I didn't value the most important love--deep-heart love.
My heart is empty & my life has no value anymore. Each moment a thousand tears.
Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.
In our country we call this type of mother love teng ai. My son has told me that in men's writing it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother's love.
a laotong relationship is made by choice...when we first looked in each other's eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us--like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love--true-heart love--must grow.
In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.
Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.
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