Elsie Chapman > Quotes

“Be the one, be worthy.”
― Elsie Chapman, Dualed

“I don't want to have to save your life,' Chord says softly. 'Not when you can do it.”
― Elsie Chapman, Dualed

“Maybe we're just supposed to try our best, whatever that is," he [Chord] said, "and hope whatever happens is meant to happen.”
― Elsie Chapman, Dualed

“He leans down, his dark eyes simmering, and kisses me until neither of us wants to come up for air. Only the ringing of the bell tears us apart.

"Damn bell," he says softly. He places his hand along the scar that rides my face from temple to chin. A slash of purple, it's never going to disappear. But it doesn't bother me.”
― Elsie Chapman, Dualed

“It rained the day they got it right. Anna could hear the thrum of it against the glass of the window as she speared a piece of meat on a fork and promptly burst into tears because it tasted just like every time her mother had made it. It tasted like rain on the air and frogs hopping across the grass and coffee beans in a jar and the green, green leaves of the forest rustling in the night and the sound of her mother humming a song. It tasted like a future in which the rain and the coffee beans and her mother weren’t out of reach after all.”
― Elsie Chapman, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“It's macaroni soup. Curls of pasta swim in steaming, fragrant broth, and pieces of boiled chicken are all tangled up with them, the meat nearly fallen off the bones. It's comfort food, the kind my parents brought over the ocean with them twenty-five years ago, and the kind that doesn't fit westernized Chinese restaurant menus. My mother used to make it for us for breakfast, before we got older and told her we had no time to eat in the morning if we wanted to make the school bus. For years now it's been only the occasional snack, a rare treat.
But I still like it best made with sugar, and so does my brother Lei. Only our older sister Yun asks for it this way, savory and salty.”
― Elsie Chapman, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“Special combo, you got it," I say into the phone. "Which one?"
"The winter melon soup."
Winter melon is symbolic of a wife- a special order of the soup means someone's is about to be abducted. A special order of egg fried rice? Someone's kid. Fried pot stickers? A husband. Shanghai chow mein with chopped-up noodles? Someone's doomed to have their life cut short, the promise of longevity broken.”
― Elsie Chapman, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“At least there's nothing traditional about an engagement dinner, so we'll be spared having to prepare a twelve-course wedding banquet loaded with meaning. There will be no roasted pig to symbolize purity. No bright red lobster for luck. No shark fin soup for wealth.”
― Elsie Chapman, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“I think we forget for a reason. If you remembered every single bad thing that ever happened to you, you'd never stop being sad.”
― Elsie Chapman, Along the Indigo

“You can't do that,' she said.
'Do what?'
'Say you hate me and then decide to take it away. Because whatever made you change your mind about hating me could easily change it back again.”
― Elsie Chapman, Along the Indigo

“Boys or girls, friends or lovers[…] it wouldn’t matter. Don’t forget we’re only ever soldiers here in Shangyu.”
― Elsie Chapman, A Thousand Beginnings and Endings

“We speak now only in echoes, in traces of what once was - ash and dust and salt, from blood and bone and tears. And you hear us now because you've let us go.”
― Elsie Chapman, Along the Indigo

“She stared at him, heart like thunder in her chest. She'd never wanted to believe words so badly. But the smells of blood and ginger filled her head and left her confused. His fury when he'd left her along the river, his regret now--which was more real?”
― Elsie Chapman, Along the Indigo