too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

But I was no longer sacared. I could see what was inside me. -Lindo

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

I have a writer's memory, which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

On the third day after someone dies, the soul comes back to settle scores. In my mother's case, this would be the first day of the lunar new year. And because it is the new year, all debts must be paid, or disaster and misfortune will follow.