Top 200 Lisa See Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

— Lisa See

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “There is no life without death. That is the true meaning of yin and yang.”

— Lisa See

3. “Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times. Doing something once is better than seeing it a hundred times.”

— Lisa See

4. “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

5. “I love research. I’d go so far as to say I’m a research fanatic.”

— Lisa See

6. “One day – and it only takes one moment to change your life forever –.”

— Lisa See

7. “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

8. “People come in and out of our lives, and the true test of friendship is whether you can pick back up right where you left off the last time you saw each other.”

— Lisa See

9. “I’ve had to think about the dark shadow side of friendship. This is the person who knows and loves you best, which means she knows all the ways to hurt and betray you.”

— Lisa See

10. “Confucius didn’t care much for women: When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.”

— Lisa See

11. “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

12. “One mistake can change the course of your life. You can never return to your original path or go back to the person you were.”

— Lisa See

13. “Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men’s decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.”

— Lisa See

14. “My writing is soaked with the tears of my heart, An invisible rebellion that no man can see. Let our life stories become tragic art. Oh, Mama, oh, sisters, hear me, hear me.” The.”

— Lisa See

15. “Yao Niang, the first tiny-footed lady. When that woman.”

— Lisa See

16. “Parents die, daughters grow up and marry out, but sisters are for life.”

— Lisa See

17. “It’s said that great sorrow is no more than a reflection of one’s capacity for great joy.”

— Lisa See

18. “As she spoke, I wanted to cry, because sometimes it’s just so damn hard to be a mother. We have to wait and wait and wait for our children to open their hearts to us. And if that doesn’t work, we have to bide our time and look for the moment of weakness when we can sneak back into their lives and they will see us and remember us for the people who love them unconditionally.”

— Lisa See

19. “A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.”

— Lisa See

20. “It was easier for me to begin picking at Snow Flower’s faults than to feel the emotions raging inside of me.”

— Lisa See

21. “As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.”

— Lisa See

22. “The sea, it is said, is like a mother. The salt water, the pulse and surges of the current, the magnified beat of your heart, and the muffled sounds reverberating through the water together recall the womb.”

— Lisa See

23. “Sisters, as you know, also have a unique relationship. This is the person who has known you your entire life, who should love you and stand by you no matter what, and yet it’s your sister who knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt you the most.”

— Lisa See

24. “Every passing moment is the passing of life; every moment of life is life itself.”

— Lisa See

25. “The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.”

— Lisa See

26. “You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain.”

— Lisa See

27. “Snow Flower was my old same for life. I had a greater and deeper love for her than I could ever feel for a person who was my husband.”

— Lisa See

28. “I wonder if there was anything I would have done differently. I hope I would have done everything differently, except I know everything would have turned out the same. That’s the meaning of fate.”

— Lisa See

29. “I didn’t know you would be here last night, but you were. We can’t fight fate. Instead, we must accept that fate has given us a special opportunity.”

— Lisa See

30. “For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me – as a girl and later as a woman – to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.”

— Lisa See

31. “You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.”

— Lisa See

32. “How can we not create a fantasy in our minds when the reality is so hard?”

— Lisa See

33. “Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming – weren’t our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?”

— Lisa See

34. “The river passes through our mountains, changing its name to Mekong where China, Laos, and Burma meet, before flowing through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the South China Sea. “Yes! It is called the Danube of the East.”

— Lisa See

35. “I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.”

— Lisa See

36. “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.”

— Lisa See

37. “Everything always returns to the beginning.”

— Lisa See

38. “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

39. “Don’t ever feel that you have to hide who you are. Nothing good ever comes from keeping secrets like that.”

— Lisa See

40. “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

41. “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

42. “Fall down eight times, stand up nine. For me, this saying is less about the dead paving the way for future generations than it is for the women of Jeju. We suffer and suffer and suffer, but we also keep getting up. We keep living. You would not be here if you weren’t brave. Now you need to be braver still.”

— Lisa See

43. “And one of the interesting things about bound feet is that they never age.”

— Lisa See

44. “In that moment I understood that the cruelest words in the universe are if only.”

— Lisa See

45. “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

46. “How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments.”

— Lisa See

47. “You are a haenyeo! Never for one moment believe you are unworthy.”

— Lisa See

48. “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

49. “You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.”

— Lisa See

50. “I’d never waste the hours of light in the darkness of slumber.”

— Lisa See