Ying-ying, you have tiger eyes. They gather fire in the day. At night they shine golden.

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

And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

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.

Your only shame is to have shame.

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?

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.