I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying. -An-mei

We all become different readers in how we respond to books, why we need them, what we take from them. We become different in the questions that arise as we read, in the answers that we find, in the degree of satisfaction or unease we feel with those answers...In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

Even though I was young, I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

Yesterday my daughter said to me, 'My marriage is falling apart.' And now all she can do is watch it falling.

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.