Best 19 quotes of Adeline Yen Mah on MyQuotes

At the age of three my grand aunt proclaimed her independence by categorically refusing to have her feet bound, resolutely tearing off the bandages as fast as they were applied.

But you can vanquish the demons only when you yourself are convinced of your own worth.

Don't trust anyone. Be a cold fish. I hurt no one. And no one can hurt me.

I read because I have to. It drives everything else from my mind. It lets me escape to find other world.

Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as opportunity.

People with yuan fen are destined to like one another; Friendship develops even if a thousand miles apart. But should yuan fen be absent between two individuals, They will remain strangers despite sitting face-to-face

Revenge is not worthy of you. If you concentrate on revenge, you will keep those wounds fresh that would otherwise have healed.

She was bedridden falling a fall which broke her hip. X-rays showed that she had cancer of the colon which had already spreed. To my surprise I found her cheerful and free of pain, perhaps because of the small doses of morphine she was being given. She was surrounded by neighbours and friends who congregated at her bedside day and night. In this cosy, noisy, gregarious world of the "all-chinese" sickbed, so different from the stark, sterile solitude of the American hospital room, her life had assumed the astounding quality of a continuous farewell party.

The future belongs to you. Should anyone insult you, tell yourself this: I am a child of destiny who will unite East and West and change the world.

Transcend your abuse and transform it into a source of courage, creativity and compassion.

You have your whole life ahead of you. Be smart. Study hard and be independent. I'm afraid the chances of your getting a dowry are slim. You must rely on yourself. No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge. The world is changing. You must make your own life outside this home.

You may be right in believing that if you study hard, one day you might become fluent in English. But you will still look Chinese, and when people meet you, they’ll see a Chinese girl no matter how well you speak English. You’ll always be expected to know Chinese, and if you don’t, I’m afraid they will not respect you as much.

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the radiologists, pathologists and anaesthesiologists - especially non-white, female ones like me. Apart from colour, we were shunned because we did not bring in patients ourselves but, like vultures, lived off the patients generated by other doctors. We were also resented because being hospital-based and not having to rent office space or hire nursing staff, we had low overheads. Since a physician's number of admissions to the hospital and referral pattern determined the degree of attention and regard accorded by colleagues, it was safe for our peers to ignore us and target those in position to send over income-producing referrals. This attitude was mirrored from the board of directors all the way down to the orderlies.

Mother Teresa once said, "Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted are the greatest poverty." To this I will add: Please believe that one single positive dream is more important than a thousand negative realities.

No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge.

That’s exactly what I’ll do, I thought to myself. After dinner, I’m going to ask Big Brother to teach me how to read this map. With Aunt Baba still in Tianjin, there’s obviously nobody looking out for me. I’ll just have to find my own way.

Though life has to be lived forward, it can only be understood backwards

To celebrate his prosperity, fellow employees and friends urged him to take a young concubine to "serve him". Even Ye Ye's boss, the London-educated K. C. Li, jokingly volunteered to "give" him a couple of girls with his bonus. Ye Ye reported all this in a matter-of-fact way in a letter to his wife, adding touchingly that he was a "one-woman man".