“What a relationship looks like on the outside isn't the same as what it's like on the inside. You can be more in love with someone in your mind than with the person you see every day.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“Sometimes our fate is different from the one we imagined for ourselves.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“Nobody can change who you are, except for you.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“I never want to love someone like that,not even him,so much that there would be no room left for myself,so much that I wouldn't be able to survive if he left me.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“You may need to change your dreams.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“I was a fool. I should have grabbed him when I could have had him all to myself, snatched him up like a ripe mango at the market. But how was I to know that this was what love felt like?”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“We would be allowed to work and not cause any trouble for her, but she didn't want us to be any more successful than she was”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“I have not been so much pushed by winds as pulled forward by the force of my decisions.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“No matter how flawed someone else may be, that doesn't give us the right to be less than we are, does it? We are decent people and we repay our debts.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“When I’m with you, I could drink water and be full.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“Dice un proverbio chino que el destino es como un temporal de vientos que, provenientes de todos los rincones, azotan nuestras vidas y nos empujan por las sendas del tiempo; quienes posean fuerza de voluntad, lucharán contra la tormenta y podrán escoger su propio camino, mientras que los débiles acabarán allá adonde los lleve la tempestad.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“It may not seem like much - a few kisses in the dark - but it was enough to burn a hole like an ulcer in my heart.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“There's a Chinese saying that the fates are winds that blow through our lives from every angle, urging us along the paths of time. Those who are strong-willed may fight the storm and possibly choose their own road, while the weak must go where they are blown. I say I have not been so much pushed by winds as pulled forward by the force of my decisions.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“Avevo perso gran parte del mio interesse per i cosmetici. Non che avessi smesso di preoccuparmi del mio aspetto, anzi, ma non riuscivo a comprendere sino in fondo come si potesse risultare simpatica o bella. Non capivo come funzionavano queste cose.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“I would have chosen statistical probabilities over luck any day.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“Me sentía como un espantapájaros ante una tempestad. En cualquier momento, el viento podría derribarme y esparcir todas las piezas que formaban mi cuerpo. Me despertaría para darme cuenta de que no quedaba nada de mí, ni rastro de la persona que quería ser.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“I never want to love someone like that, not even Matt, so much that there would be no room left for myself, so much that I wouldn’t be able to survive if he left me.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
“nadie puede cambiar lo que eres, excepto tú misma.”
― Jean Kwok, quote from Girl in Translation
Jean Kwok
Born place: Hong Kong
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“Ivo Andric, Bosnian chronicle (Quote about nostalgia, free translation from Bosnian lenguage)
More than three hundred years ago, brought us from our homeland, a unique Andalusia, a terrible, foolish, fratricidal whirlwind, which we can not understand even today, and who has not understood it to this day, scattered us all over the world and made us beggars to which gold does not help. Now, threw us on the East, and life on the East is not easy for us or blessed, and the as much man goes further and gets closer to the sun's birth, it is worse, because the land is younger and more raw and people are from the land. And our trouble is that we could not fully love this country, to which we owe becouse it has received us, accept us and provided us with shelter, nor could we hate the one who has unjustly took us away and expelled us as an unworthly sons. We do not know is it more difficult that we are here or that we are not there. Wherever we were outside of Spain, we would suffer because we would have two homelands, I know, but here life is too much pressed us and humiliated us. I know that we have been changed for a long time,we do not remember anymore how we were, but surely we remember that we were different. We left and road up long time ago and we traveled hard and we unluckily fell down and stopped at this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. As a powder on a fruit that goes hand-to-hand, from man first fall of what is finest on him. That's why we are like this. But you know us, us and our life, if we can call this life. We live between "occupiers" and commonalty, miserable commonalty and terrible Turkish. Cutted away completely from our loved ones, we are careful to look after and keep everything Spanish, songs and meals and customs, but we feel that everything changes in us, spoils and forgets. We remember the language of our land, the lenguage we did take and carried three centuries ago, the lenguage which even do not speak there anymore, and we ridiculously speak with stumbling the language of the comonalty with which we suffer and the Turkish who rules over us. So it may not be a long day when we will be purely and humanly able to express ourselves only in prayer, and which actually does not need any words.
This so lonely and few, we marry between us and see that our blood is paling and fainting. We bend and shred in front of everyone, we mourn, suffer and contrive, as people said: on the ice we make campfire, we work, we gain, we save, not only for ourselves and for our children, but for all those who are stronger and more insolent, impudent than us and strike on our life , on the dignity, and on the wealth. So we preserved the faith for which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Luckily, and to our sorrow, we did not lose from our memory reminiscence of our dear country, as it was, before she drive away us like stepmother; just as it will never extinguish in us the desire for a better world, the world of order and humanity in which you goes stright, watches calmly and speaks openly. We can not free ourselves from that feeling, nor feeling that, in addition to everything, we belong to such a world, though, we are expelled and unhappy, otherwise we live. That's what we would like to know there. That our name does not die in that brighter and higher world that is constantly darkening and destroying, iconstantly moves and changes, but never collapses, and always for somebody exists, that that world knows that we are carrying him in our soul, that even here we serve him on our way, and we feel one with him, even though we are forever and hopelessly separated from him.”
― Ivo Andrić, quote from Bosnian Chronicle
“...we found our own synchronicity together, his heart thumping out a slow. steady beat and mine filling in the spaces between”
― Jessi Kirby, quote from Things We Know by Heart
“(“An eye for an eye,” Mac said at the squadron reunion. Until everyone was blind, Teddy wondered?)”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from A God in Ruins
“The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, quote from Colony
“Throughout his job ordeal, my father never complained. He remained an Iranian who loved his native country but who also believed in American ideals. He only said how sad it was that people so easily hate an entire population simply because of the actions of a few. And what a waste it is to hate, he always said. What a waste.”
― Firoozeh Dumas, quote from Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Life Expectancy
Lunar Park
Black House
Born of Night
Foundation and Earth
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