Clichés are static, the emotion behind them long spent. If you are tempted to use them, here is a saying of my mother’s: Fang pi bu-cho, cho pi bu-fang. Basically that translates to: "Loud farts don’t stink, and the really smelly ones don’t make a sound." In other words: When you’re full of beans, you just blow a lot of hot air. If you want to have a real impact, be deadly but silent. Oh, also recognize the difference between a bad cliché and a good quotation. My mother’s saying is a good quotation. You should use it often.

It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.

Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument.

I love and am loved, fully and freely, nothing expected, more than enough received.

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better. -Jing-mei

When you lose your face..., it is like dropping your necklace down a well. The only way you can get it back is to fall in after it.

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.