Jennifer Tseng > Quotes

“Then too there was the irrepressible librarian in her who could not stand by and watch a human being in distress without leaping to her aid, whether that person could not find the coin slot on the copier or was on the brink of domestic destruction.”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“It seemed to me people who omitted possessive pronouns were capable of great intimacies, those that defied context and transcended possession.”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“I found it to be a beautiful tendency, a sign of good health that one's eyes should open rather than shut at the sound of a human voice telling a story.”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“I have lived on a series of islands and I began as an island: I, an obscure piece of earth, floating choiceless within my mother's sea.”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“In the midst of my new productivity I came, at last, to appreciate passivity, to view it as its own kind of audacity ... Passivity is also the cousin of patience, which is, I think, a distant relative of faith. Doesn't the act of waiting imply faith in the arrival?”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“Our closeness never made us complacent. We understood each other's value; we understood that even the one closest to us must be sought.”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

“Often the person across the room with whom you first lock eyes should be bypassed in favor of the quieter, less charismatic person standing next to them.”
― Jennifer Tseng

“Doesn't intimacy foster reverence more completely than anything that can be taught?”
― Jennifer Tseng, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness