Liza Dalby Quotes

I cannot pretend that I understood my mother at the end of her life. I was trying to follow the goals she had set me even though she had rejected them for herself. I took the following to be her death poem: Why do we suffer so in the world? Just regard life as the short bloom of the mountain cherry. Over the years, my opinion of this poem changed. At first I considered it another lament in the pessimistic mode she so often adopted. Then one day I realized it was actually joyous, and my entire understanding of her was transformed. In the end she had no more sorrow than does a cherry blossom at its falling.

The moon is more interesting than the unchanging sun. That is surely why it is used in poetry and the sun is not - unless one talks of dawn or dusk, when the sun briefly hovers on the edge of day.

Why couldn't I simply accept things as they were and be grateful? I wondered. How I envied people whose desires were simple and who could find joy in life as it is. Surely there was no reason why I shouldn't take pleasure in the marvelous things I was in a position to see and hear – yet all I felt was weariness. Page 329

I could always tell when I was ready to write again, for I became irritable.

It seemed to me that people do a rather good job of creating levels of hell all by themselves, and this was something worth writing about.

In white, everything was vividly stark, like those line drawings in which everyone's black hair seems to literally to grow from the paper.

But how ridiculous that I should bereft simply because I couldn't spend hours in my world of make-believe! Wasn't the reality of my life interesting enough? This is surely the time to let go of grievances, I told myself sternly. What good does it do to dwell on them? Brooding on a nest of grudges will only hatch more grief.

I was convinced the answer to life's enigmas must lie in connecting our emotional yearnings to nature.

Fate is unmoved by one's pitiful hopes; what changes, bowing to fate, is what one hopes for.

I realized that when we finally reached Miyako, I would be stepping into a new life and would have to stop thinking about Ming-gwok. I imagined a small lacquered box inlaid with silver and gold in a pattern of curling waves, inset with silver cranes. Into this imaginary box I placed all my memories of Ming-gwok and secretly tucked it away in my heart.