I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me.

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

Why do some memories live only on your tongue or in your nose? Why do others always stay in your heart?

Fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention.

Love is tricky. It is never mundane or daily. You can never get used to it. You have to walk with it, then let it walk with you. You can never balk. It moves you like the tide. It takes you out to sea, then lays you on the beach again. Today's struggling pain is the foundation for a certain stride through the heavens. You can run from it but you can never say no. It includes everyone.

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want.

But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people - men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.