Janie Chang > Quotes

“That’s the trouble when you’re young, my hun soul says. You think you have all the time in the world. You think the world will wait until you’re ready.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“Have you noticed ... that he actually hadn't made any promises to you?”
― Janie Chang

“We can't control other's fates, we can barely manage our own. But we can hope for tomorrow. Tomorrow we can hope for rebirth.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“So many poems about the moon, but what about the stars?" Professor Kang said, breaking into her thoughts. "The moon comes and goes through its cycles but the stars always shine for us, constant and true. We should honor them more.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“Enjoyment comes from wandering through a series of vistas, from noticing how bamboo shadows cast against a whitewashed wall create a scene or how latticework openings in a wall play a role in the illusion of shadow and light. The visitor is unaware and uncaring of the garden’s boundaries, barely glimpsed through pine and bamboo, obscured so that the garden appears endless…”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“Maybe it's because legends are truer to our natures than serious literature. Maybe myths and legends reveal more about us than poetry or epic histories.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“Why is Anna Karenina considered such a great novel? It's all about adultery and the unhappiness it causes, nothing unusual in novels, surely."
"The novel's about family relationships, class, and social change.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“The best gardens are created through the art of deception, says Fox. Gardens should employ the art of the large in the small and the small in the large, providing for the real in the unreal and the unreal in the real.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“He enjoys reading film magazines."
Gaoyin pursed her lips. In our family, that made Tienzhen practically illiterate.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“If you believed only what the stories say, you'd think we do nothing but wreak mischief.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“But she has hope. And therefore persistence," Sparrow said. "The persistence of water, no matter how small a trickle, eventually wears a path through rock. And eternity is more porous than rock.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“Not the stout balding man. Not a Nikolai. A Vronsky.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“It's easier not to love, Fox had said.
Yet Fox had loved her human friends, of this I was certain. She loved my mother, loved me. How long could anyone live, even an immortal, without giving in to love?”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“Gardens should employ the art of the large int he small and the small in the arg, providing for the real in the unreal and the unreal in the real.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“You've suffered enough for three lifetimes, Mama," I said. "You desere to go through. But I want to live at least one lifetime in this world. I'll be all right.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“How can you tell whether anyone is truly good or evil? I've been a Fox for hundreds of years and from what I've seen it takes generations before consequences truly run their course.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“If I'd taken Fox's powers, I could've lived for hundreds of years, known and loved many people. But then I would've had to watch them die of illnessor old age. How many different kinds of pain can there be? How much loss can the human heart endure?
I knew why those other foxes, once human, had wanted to die. Their hearts had remained human een though they wielded the powers of a fox. They were ready to die because they had lost too many loved ones over the centuries, because they had suffered such an accumulation of blows to the heart that all love had been beaten out of them, all joy turned to ash.
It was better to tread my own path in life as a human.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“Myths are the darkest and brightest incarnations of who we are. They slip into our dreams and underpin our reality. Perhaps that's why the gods judged the Library of Legends worthy of special protection.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“How often do you wake from a dream so vivid that for the first few minutes the dream is more real than your waking?”
― Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon

“When the Palace gates close, the gods and guardian spirits will leave your skies. The constellations will shine as before, but they will be just what your scientists say they are, flaming balls of gas and rock. People might continue to pray, but whatever boons or burdens follow will not come from the gods. They will be of your own making.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“It was far better to feel nothing but emptiness. Why had no one warned her that emptiness could be so heavy?”
― Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon

“Sometimes mercy is merely the absence of pain.”
― Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon

“There was nothing to forgive, nothing to explain. Her love washed over me to erase all the years that had come between us.”
― Janie Chang

“The only thing you can count on is that the gods make other plans.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“irrationally fearful. She turned her eyes away as”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends

“When Auguste's troop was dispatched to rescue European civilians and soldiers inside the International Legations, under attack by Chinese Boxers and the Imperial Chinese Army, he had been told they would be fighting barbarians. But everything he saw, the architecture and gardens, the exquisite craftsmanship, the private libraries, told him otherwise. They were plundering a civilized society. One whose emperors had refused to allow in new ideas and new inventions for hundreds of years. A country unable to stand against Western firepower and Western alliances.”
― Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon

“Knowledge sharpens your wits.”
― Janie Chang, Dragon Springs Road

“a woman’s true value is measured by the size of her dowry.”
― Janie Chang, Three Souls

“Spoils of war.' Why does no one understand the ugliness, the brutality of those words?”
― Janie Chang, The Porcelain Moon

“But it was a beautiful morning. A high wind fanned thin white veils of cloud across a clear, clean blue sky to skim the mountaintops.”
― Janie Chang, The Library of Legends