I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see,….

I'd like to be more forgiving. There are times when I've had a hard time forgiving people who have betrayed me..

You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them..

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

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away..

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

When you already believe something, how can you suddenly stop? When you are a loyal friend, how can you no longer be one?.

In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward..

I can never remember things I didn't understand in the first place..

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me..

I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you're in control..

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

And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood..

For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me..

We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others..

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden..

I like to go somewhere where I learn something I didn't know before, like the Dry Tortugas between Florida and Cuba..

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

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

I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable... Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. Af….

I felt like a rich vagabond who had passed through the world paving my way with gold fairy dust, then realizing too late that the path disintegrated ….