272 Quotes by Lisa See

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.

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. But you can’t eat a leather belt like it’s a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days.

Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete...

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 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.

A weak man always seeks to hurt those lower than he.

A woman isn’t just one thing. The past is in us, constantly changing us. Heartache and failure shift perspectives as do joy and triumphs.

It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy. I see it from the opposite direction. I’m happy, but there’s an empty space inside me that will never stop suffering from the loss of Yan-yeh.

You have special abilities,” she goes on. “I don’t mean you are a witch or a fox spirit. And you’ve never seemed drawn to the special gift of healing or magic. Rather, you are like A-ma Mata, who gave birth to the Akha people, who pushed against her restraints, who said, ‘No, I will not accept my bad fate,’ and who endured against all odds with her intelligence, compassion, and perseverance. All that comes from this grove. And the mother tree.” A-ma.