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

Why do you think you are missing something you never had?

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

I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable.

My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the world of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco.

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.

She [my mother] said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.