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

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

My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female.

And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?

how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

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 all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. -Suyuan