To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world--that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.

Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems.

The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.

The way I'm going now is to focus on peace, to create peace. As Sister Corita said, "I don't go to anti-war rallies. I go to peace rallies."

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.