Lisa See Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.

Lisa See
I've come to believe that part of lovesickness comes from this conflict between control and desire. In love we have no control. Our hearts and minds are tormented, teased, enticed and delighted by the overwhelming strength of emotions that make us try to forget the real world.

Lisa See
He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.

Lisa See
All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality.

Lisa See
May and I are sisters. We'll always fight, but we'll always make up as well. That's what sisters do: we argue, we point out each other's frailties, mistakes, and bad judgment, we flash the insecurities we've had since childhood, and then we come back together. Until the next time.

Lisa See
Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.

Lisa See
Poetry is on earth to make you serene, not corrupt your mind, thoughts, or emotions

Lisa See
When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

Lisa See
In our country we call this type of mother love teng ai. My son has told me that in men's writing it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother's love.

Lisa See
Gone were my girlish ideas about romantic love and my later ideas about sexual love. From Yi, I learned to appreciate deep-heart love. Peony in Love

Lisa See
The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.

Lisa See
Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.

Lisa See
I am still learning about love. I thought I understood it—not just mother love, but the love for one's parents, for one's husband, and for one's laotong. I've experienced the other types of love—pity love, respectful love and gratitude love. But looking at our secret fan with its messages written between Snow Flower and me over many years, I see that I didn't value the most important love—deep-heart love.

Lisa See
My love for him had never gone away but only changed, growing deeper like wine fermenting or pickles curing. It bore into me with the pervasiveness of water working its way to the center of a mountain.

Lisa See
All women on earth— and men, too for that matter— hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, & gives us the courage to survive our little deaths: the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs.

Lisa See
Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.

Lisa See
A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.

Lisa See
Don't ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.

Lisa See
You make choices that are good and sound, but the gods have other plans for you.

Lisa See
In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.

Lisa See
While she is lovely, we need to remember that her face is not what distinguishes her. Her beauty is a reflection of the virtue and talent she keeps inside.

Lisa See
When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love

Lisa See
When the sun is shining, think of the time it won't be, because even when you're sitting in your house with the doors shut, misfortune can fall from above.

Lisa See
In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.

Lisa See
Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.

Lisa See
You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

Lisa See
How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?

Lisa See
I've never thought much about whether I was happy or if I had fun as a child. I was a so-so girl who lived with a so-so family in a so-so village. I didn't know that there might be another way to live, and I didn't worry about it either.

Lisa See
We're told that men are strong & brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat & bear physical & mental agony much better than men.

Lisa See
Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints — that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to the bone, homesick, and sad. We were supposed to speak directly about our feelings without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial.

Lisa See