Adeline Yen Mah · 205 pages
Rating: (25.6K votes)
“Please believe that one single positive dream is more important than a thousand negative realities.”
“I read because I have to. It drives everything else from my mind. It lets me escape to find other world.”
“But you can vanquish the demons only when you yourself are convinced of your own worth.”
“Transcend your abuse and transform it into a source of courage, creativity and compassion.”
“Never get involved. That's my motto. I hurt no one. And no one can hurt me.”
“Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards”
“You may be right in believing that if you study hard, one day you might become fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese, and when people meet you, they’ll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you speak English. You’ll always be expected to know Chinese, and if you don’t, I’m afraid they will not respect you as much.”
“keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as oportunity.”
“That’s exactly what I’ll do, I thought to myself. After dinner, I’m going to ask Big
Brother to teach me how to read this map. With Aunt Baba still in Tianjin, there’s
obviously nobody looking out for me. I’ll just have to find my own way.”
“Day after day, anxiety spun its web around my thoughts and spread to all corners of my heart.”
“Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as opportunity.”
“quickly pretended disappointment. We hailed a taxi and squeezed in with all our luggage. Aunt Reine”
“You can vanquish the demons only when you yourself are convinced of your own worth.”
“I ran over without a word, cradled PLT tenderly in my arms and carried her upstairs. Placing her on my own bed, I wrapped my mortally wounded pet in my best school scarf and lay down next to her. It was a night of grief I have never forgotten.”
“No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.”
“It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.”
“Every man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl, and Kino's pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy. The news stirred up something infinitely black and evil in the town; the black distillate was like the scorpion, or like hunger in the smell of food, or like loneliness when love is withheld. The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it.”
“Ah, go boil yer heads, both of yeh,” said Hagrid. “Harry — yer a wizard.”
“Of all the secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the most divine was humor.”
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