The Many Daughters of Afong Moy Quotes

“The most important lesson I can teach you is to never settle for what others want you to be. Find a way to be the person you need to be to truly be happy. Don't give in to convention. Don't make the same mistake I did. Marriage to the wrong person is like stepping in quicksand, you lose yourself, bit by bit, slowly suffocating until your disappear completely.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“We don't have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost. That which was never allowed to be.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“That's the point, isn't it? To keep learning. To grow. To do more good than harm. To create compassion. To understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence. All of us play a role in another person's life. What goes around comes around.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Karma is more like a suitcase. You have to be unafraid to open it up and look at what's inside, to unpack the things you do not need. Karma is the climate of the past which shapes how much leeway we have in the future.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“It was during those terrible years, Dorothy's early teens, that she confronted her mother,....
tearing her down with the crowbars and wrecking balls that only angry teenagers know how to wield against the weak spots of their parents' load-bearing walls.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy: A Novel

“In America, a lie becomes the truth with sufficient repetition.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“I need to try again, to spend more time loving who my husband is instead of hating who he isn't.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Each generation is built upon the genetic ruins of the past. That our lives are merely biological waypoints. We're not individual flowers, annuals that bloom and then die. We're perennials. A part of us comes back each new season, carrying a bit of the genus of the previous floret.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Strangers are the people we forgot we needed in this life,”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Hearts don't have maps," Zofia said.
Zoe smiled. "Oh, but they do. They're written inside you, and only a very special person can read it and follow its directions to a buried treasure." Zoe touched the place above her heart. "We all have a buried treasure and it's right here.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Anis Mojgani once said about toddlers: They cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“If you plant an acorn ... it may grow to become an oak tree. Yet there is no acorn within that wooden body. Has the acorn been reborn as a tree? Or does the acorn grow up to be something else entirely? It's my belief that the acorn and the tree are an idea, spread out over an abstraction of time. And if that new tree, when fully grown, drops one acorn or a thousand, that idea keeps progressing as this thing we call life.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“It's my belief that we are just an ever-changing collection of memories that, when added up, create the illusion of self.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there, it’s that we ignore the ones who are.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Dorothy remembered an old line of poetry from Rupi Kaur: If people were rain, men would be drizzle, and women a hurricane.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“If you plant an acorn,” he said, “it may grow to become an oak tree. Yet there is no acorn within that wooden body. Has the acorn been reborn as a tree? Or does the acorn grow to be something else entirely?”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“good than harm, to create compassion, to understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence? All of us play a role in another person’s life.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“We don’t have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost, that which was never allowed to be.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“The idea of treating trauma passed down from one generation to the next in humans was highly controversial, to say the least. Just the idea of historical trauma was argumentative, though the concept had been widely accepted in Native American communities for hundreds of years, or more recently, within groups descended from Holocaust survivors. Yet therapists and geneticists had been puzzled for decades, searching for evidence of what they called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“The idea of epigenetic inheritance has long been embraced in many communities. Native Americans have talked about living with generational trauma for as long as I can remember and a hotly debated study of Holocaust survivors appears to show a higher percentage of PTSDs, depression, and anxiety in their children and grandchildren.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“The bandleader sang 'Every time I see a crowd of people, just like a fool, I stop and stare. It's really not the proper thing to do, but maybe you'll be there.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Don't change. Instead change the world.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“you’re both waves on the same ocean. Of course, you are separate, you crest and you fall as individual waves, but fundamentally you come from the same place, and when the ocean is calm, it is impossible to tell where he ends and you begin.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“We have many lives, Afong, but this life begins when we realize we only have one.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“epigenetic inheritance”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“We’re consumed with the here and now, the death and destruction around us, our hopes and dreams, our longings and aspirations, our failings and our regrets. We’re too occupied with the abundance of the present and our hopes for the future to remember all the details of the past.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“BUDDHIST BOOTCAMP. NON-JUDGMENT DAY IS NEAR.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“All Quiet on the Western Front”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“transgenerational epigenetic inheritance,”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

“Epigenetics combined with the philosophical idea of Determinism made me wonder if free will is—if not an illusion—a bit of a mirage. That, in addition to the environment we grow up in, the contour and texture of our lives are shaped—in part—by some form of genetic predetermination.”
― Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy