Lisa See
Lisa See
Lisa See is an American writer and novelist. Her paternal great-grandfather was Chinese, which has had a great impact on her life and work. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, a detailed account of See's family history, and the novels Flower Net, The Interior, Dragon Bones, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Loveand Shanghai Girls, which made it to the 2010 New York Times bestseller list. Both Shanghai Girls and Snow...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 February 1955
CountryUnited States of America
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.
Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming -- weren't our dreams what gave us strength, hope, and desire?
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.
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.
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
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.
The greatest calling of all is to have a literary life.
My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.
I think all women have a friend who at some point dumped them or betrayed them or deeply disappointed them. And at the same time all women have a friend who they dumped or betrayed or hurt in some way. That's universal in women's friendships.
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.
When people are alive they love, when they die, they keep loving. If love ends when person dies, that is not real love
What stays with me most is a general sense of loss, unease, and longing for the past that cannot be relieved.
You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.
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.