Quotes from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“If you make happy those that are near, those that are far will come.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Whenever I see her, we laugh enough to last for the month. She's my best friend, and someday when we're old enough I'm going to talk her into staying here forever.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“She's my friend, the boy said simply. That's who she is and that's enough for me. As Minli looked at the buffalo boy, aglow with happiness against his poor surroundings, she saw it was enough for him. More than enough, as the smile that kept curling up on his face told her.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Yes," Ba said sadly, "it is impossible. But it is not ridiculous.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“You only lose what you cling to.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Bringing fortune to our house! Making Fruitless Mountain bloom! You're always wishing to do impossible things! Stop believing stories and stop wasting your time.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“That is a question you have to ask the Old Man of the Moon.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Fortune was not a house full of gold and jade, but something much more.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Stories are not a waste of time”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Impossible?" the goldfish man said. "Don't you see? Even fates written in the Book of Fortunes can be changed. How can anything be impossible?”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“For even in the misty light, the goldfish man could see her smiling a secret smile up to the sky to where the mountain meets the moon.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Minli suddenly thought of Ma and Ba. A wave of longing washed through her and a dryness caught in her throat that the tea could not moisten. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“Do you remember the story I told you about the paper of happiness? And the secret, which was one word written over and over again? … I have thought a long time about what that word could have been,” Ba said. “Was it wisdom or honor? Love or truth? For a long time I liked to think that the word was kindness.”

Ma’s face remained hidden in Minli’s bed, but her sobs had stopped and Ba knew she was listening.

“But now,” Ba said, “I think, perhaps, the word was faith.”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

“او سرانجام فهمیده بود که خنده و سرخوشی دخترش با داشتن لباسهای زیبا و جواهرات بیشتر نمیشد و شور و شادی، مثل هدیه ای بسته بندی شده در انتظار باز شدن، داخل خانه ی خودش بود!”
― Grace Lin, quote from Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

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Popular quotes

“No man shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight hereafter who does not in some measure behold it here by faith.”
― John Owen, quote from The Glory of Christ

“You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Marked in Flesh

“[A Chinese Restaurant.] Roma is seated alone at the booth. Lingk is at the booth next to him. Roma ,i>is talking to him.
* * *

Roma: . . . Eh? What I’m saying, what is our life? (Pause.) It’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank,/i> closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ’em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: “There is a one-in-a million chance that so and so will happen. . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me. . . .” No. We know that’s not the right way I think. (Pause.) We say the correct way to deal with this is “There is a one-in-so-and-so chance that this will happen . . . God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me. . . .” But no to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? “If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.” I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, (a) odds are that I have it, and (b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.)”
― David Mamet, quote from Glengarry Glen Ross

“...it's better to wake up amid the pangs of desire than amid those of remorse.”
― Amin Maalouf, quote from Balthasar's Odyssey

“Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning

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