Lisa See Quotes

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.

I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.

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 insecuritie...

Everyone knows that part of the spirit descends to the afterworld, while part of it remains with the family, but we have a special belief about the spirit of a young woman who has died before her marr...

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.

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 probl...

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 sc...

We hug, but there are no tears. For every awful thing that's been said and done, she is my sister. Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life. She is the only person left i...

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...

Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.

The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.

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.

Maybe we're all like that with our mothers. They seem ordinary until one day they're extraordinary.

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.

But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you'll go, in what you'll accept, and pretty soon you're at the bottom

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...

Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have...