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When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound. (p19)

I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. (p29)

Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order, not even when they bind people to one another from childhood and raise them together. (p12, "No Name Woman")

Fancy lovers never last. (p81)

Mental work was harder than physical work, although it was not exactly the mind that teaching strained. (p41)

Not many women got to live out the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. (p61)

"We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment." (Brave Orchid, p154, "At the Western Palace")

As a child I feared the size of the world. The farther away the sound of howling dogs, the farther away the sound of the trains, the tighter I curled myself under the quilt. The trains sounded deeper and deeper into the night. They had not reached the end of the world before I stopped hearing them, the last long moan diminishing toward China. How large the world must be to make my grandmother only a taste by the time she reaches me. (p99)

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear. (p87)

I don't want anybody attached to me forever with gratitude. (p85)

I had to get out of hating range. (p52)

The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (p64)