“I forced myself to open my eyes. I was a Puckett, damn it. And Pucketts didn't lose our nerve. We schemed, we interjected, we occasionally drank too much and told someone what we really thought of them at a Christmas party, but we never lost our nerve.”

“sometimes we need someone else to open our eyes to what's really going on in our lives!”

“My nerves needed a break, not a reminder of how much trouble we were in. I prowled around, but it didn't help. I still felt like my skin was on too tight.”

“It's not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable...What was worse, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?"So we decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren't allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that's how we came to call our little parties Joy Luck.”

“When you say "I" and "my" too much, you lose the capacity to understand the "we" and "our".”

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”