I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the sou. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true....If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.

We are the kind of people who obsess over one word... but we have only one shot to get it right in concert. It was hard the first time I practiced with them. I was so nervous that my vocal chords were paralyzed for about a half-hour.

Your life is what you see in front of you. -An-mei

Now they seemed to be in a contest over who could irritate her more, and she sometimes had to remind herself that teenagers had souls

...we were like two people standing apart on separate mountain peaks, recklessly leaning forward to throw stones at one another, unaware of the dangerous chasm that separated us.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

We are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.