“Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself! It cannot be called our mother, but our grave.”

“To the country dug into our lives like a grave,to the country etherized, and killed,a sun rises from our paralyzed historyinto our millennial sleep”

“For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself / all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind.”

“In our country we call this type of mother love teng ai. My son has told me that in men's writing it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother's love.”

“Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.”

“A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.”