Top 200 Lisa See Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All the time, I looked out our lattice window. I watched the birds fly by. I followed the clouds on their travels. I studied the moon as it grew larger, then shrank. So much happened outside my window that I almost forgot what was happening inside that room.”

— Lisa See

102. “What’s your first impression of a new place? Is it the first meal you eat? Your first ice cream cone? The first person you meet? The first night you spend in your new bed in your new home? The first broken promise?”

— Lisa See

103. “The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.”

— Lisa See

104. “What better place to look for trash than in America – the land of consumption and waste?”

— Lisa See

105. “Always remember If you don’t love tea, you can’t make good tea.”

— Lisa See

106. “I don’t really know anything about the movie business, even though I’ve lived in Los Angeles my whole life – somehow I’ve never bumped into it.”

— Lisa See

107. “The lotus symbolizes purity, because it rises out of the mud but looks pristine.”

— Lisa See

108. “Tea reminds us to slow down and escape the pressures of modern life,” he says.”

— Lisa See

109. “But why bother trying to turn a monkey into a goat?”

— Lisa See

110. “You cannot refuse to eat just because there’s a chance of being choked.”

— Lisa See

111. “Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.”

— Lisa See

112. “It’s fair to say I don’t know what I’m doing. I like to plot my life and proceed carefully, but life doesn’t always follow a plan.”

— Lisa See

113. “What was the purpose of being wrapped like a present if you had no feelings for the person you were being given to?”

— Lisa See

114. “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

115. “People are shaped by the earth and water around them.”

— Lisa See

116. “Although I can’t possibly have a single memory of this place. Then, from deep within me, a profound sense of love radiating out to everything around me complemented by reciprocal waves of love coming at me, enveloping me. All.”

— Lisa See

117. “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

— Lisa See

118. “Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.”

— Lisa See

119. “I had always thought it was her way of blinding herself to the messiness of the way we lived. Now I realised it was easier for her mind to go out through the air far above the clouds than to acknowledge the ugliness right before her eyes.”

— Lisa See

120. “No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.”

— Lisa See

121. “You may not know this, but the cold-water stress that the haenyeo endure is greater than for any other human group in the world.”

— Lisa See

122. “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

123. “When you don’t have much, having less isn’t so bad.”

— Lisa See

124. “What husband wants a wife who thinks she’s smarter than he is?”

— Lisa See

125. “This is how things were: heavyhearted, but done in the traditional manner. THE.”

— Lisa See

126. “The three-step farming system that gives our pigs food from our behinds, fertilizer for our dry fields from the pigs’ behinds, and a pig that can eventually be eaten.”

— Lisa See

127. “You can always count on people to crowded your party when you’re in glory but you should never dream of people sending you charcoal in the cold.”

— Lisa See

128. “Opium and heroin had not caused our poverty and hopelessness. Rather, poverty and hopelessness had brought about an unquenchable desire to forget. After.”

— Lisa See

129. “You have special abilities,” she goes on. “I don’t mean you are a witch or a fox spirit. And you’ve never seemed drawn to the special gift of healing or magic. Rather, you are like A-ma Mata, who gave birth to the Akha people, who pushed against her restraints, who said, ‘No, I will not accept my bad fate,’ and who endured against all odds with her intelligence, compassion, and perseverance. All that comes from this grove. And the mother tree.” A-ma.”

— Lisa See

130. “Perhaps he was afraid as I was that we’d be caught. Or perhaps he was breathing me in just as I was letting him come into my lungs, my eyes, my heart.”

— Lisa See

131. “The machete has been tested, and the rice already cooked.”

— Lisa See

132. “Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.”

— Lisa See

133. “I write a thousand words a day.”

— Lisa See

134. “The problem with living so long is that you see too many people pass before you.”

— Lisa See

135. “The realization that truth, forgiveness, and goodness are more important than revenge, condemnation, and cruelty gives me courage and certainty.”

— Lisa See

136. “But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you’ll go, in what you’ll accept, and pretty soon you’re at the bottom.”

— Lisa See

137. “No coincidence, no story.”

— Lisa See

138. “To protect my heart, this is what I would have to do with Snow Flower. I couldn’t let anyone know I was dying from anguish that she no longer loved me.”

— Lisa See

139. “And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.”

— Lisa See

140. “To believe in dreams is to spend half your life asleep.”

— Lisa See

141. “When she reaches the ground, she looks from the old woman to me. A moment of confusion. Then recognition. I know her too, because I’ve seen traces of her in my face in the mirror. My mother. My a-ma.”

— Lisa See

142. “The fallen leaves return to the root.”

— Lisa See

143. “Man becomes wiser and more mature through life experience. The same can be said of tea.”

— Lisa See

144. “It’s a Sun and Moon truth that if a husband sees his wife give birth, he might die from it.”

— Lisa See

145. “We had a meeting where we were supposed to learn how to respond to jerks who ask things like “When did you know you were adopted?” Most people picture a scene where the parents sit you down and you “find out who you are.” I didn’t need that meeting to know how to answer, because all I had to do was look in the mirror. When people ask me that question, I always say, “When did you find out you weren’t adopted? How do you know your mother is your birth mother?”

— Lisa See

146. “I think sometimes as an adult, you take people for what they do, and what they are now, instead of the whole picture of their lives.”

— Lisa See

147. “No matter what you’re feeling or how desperate you become, always take a moral position. If you do that, God will watch over you.”

— Lisa See

148. “To see Sow Flower’s mother eat that meat was something I’ll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less that a cultivated woman.”

— Lisa See

149. “Blessings and worry, happiness and fear – this is a mother’s love.”

— Lisa See

150. “And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.”

— Lisa See