The Woman Warrior Quotes

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

We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment.

You're too young to decide to live forever.

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.

Hunger also changes the world—when eating can't be a habit, than neither can seeing.

Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knot-maker.

She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.

Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure. Then I get bitter: I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported. Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.

Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.