Nicole Mones Quotes

#1. He forgot all that was strange about her face when she smiled. Because then, pleasure just burst out from somewhere inside her. He liked that. It was uncontrolled.

Nicole Mones

#2. But I get frightened sometimes," she admitted.
"I know. Fear is only fear, though."
"And somehow you live without it."
"No," he corrected her. "You live with it.

Nicole Mones

#3. I don't hope," he answered, eyes on her. "I never hope. I just live in gratitude for what comes.

Nicole Mones

#4. So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.

Nicole Mones

#5. Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.

Nicole Mones

#6. An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

Nicole Mones

#7. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes - perfect for small and secret spaces.

Nicole Mones

#8. Even though Japan and Germany were not formal allies at the time that Japan conquered Shanghai in 1937, still, Frenchtown was an area that Japan could take complete control of - and they did. And it was the locus of nightlife.

Nicole Mones

#9. Everything except the freedom to be what she wanted to be - whatever that was. She had to break away. Whether he liked it or not. She had to.

Nicole Mones

#10. Everything looks different. The houses are all these wild colors. The light is strange. It smells primeval. You're on Mars."
"You are talking about driving?" Lin attempted to clarify.
"About wanderlust," she answered.

Nicole Mones

#11. But in the end he didn't love her enough to fight for her.

Nicole Mones

#12. She shrugged, knowing all too well how easy it was to long for a different life, how hard it was to find one's way there.

Nicole Mones

#13. Chinese food tries to engage the mind, not just the palate. To provoke the intellect.

Nicole Mones

#14. He looked at her. There was something about her. When he was with her he felt happy, excited; when he was apart from her he found himself wanting to be with her again.

Nicole Mones

#15. Food is the main engine that drives connectedness, relationship in Chinese society.

Nicole Mones

#16. Did you ever want something so deeply you were scared to let yourself have it? Like a desire so great you know you will never forgive yourself if you fail. So you hang back. And then you wake up one day and you realize if you don't do it now, it will move out of reach forever.

Nicole Mones

#17. Full of rage at a world which seemed all wrong to her and dreaming about someplace where she would belong, really belong.

Nicole Mones

#18. I don't believe fundamentally in anything but the awakening of spirit, hope, and freedom.

Nicole Mones

#19. That as a human being I'm not necessarily static, but ... evolving. That I'm supposed to grow and develop, just like the physical world, the planet, the universe.

Nicole Mones

#20. Breaking some respected boundaries means a torrent of new life.

Nicole Mones

#21. She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or she'd told herself all these years.

Nicole Mones

#22. A door to an alternate self. This self was another Alice, not the childhood Alice: capable, free in the world, independent.

Nicole Mones

#23. What was more brutal than loss of hope?

Nicole Mones

#24. Grief is a killer, isn't it?" he said. "Brings you right up to the truth.

Nicole Mones

#25. We are fish swimming in a cooking pot

Nicole Mones

#26. Did you really love her? Did you really enter her heart and mind? Or did the two of you always remain outside each other?

Nicole Mones

#27. For someone grieving, cook with chives, ginger, coriander, and rosemary. Theirs is the pungent flavor, which draws grief up and out of the body and releases it into the air.

Nicole Mones

#28. In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.

Nicole Mones

#29. You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.

Nicole Mones

#30. You know how someone - something - surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That's done through Chinese cuisine - for example, through dishes of artifice. That's a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.

Nicole Mones

#31. They connected on every level - mental, philosophical, emotional. But she couldn't have him, not all of him.

Nicole Mones

#32. Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners.

Nicole Mones

#33. If there was one thing she knew by then, by age twenty-two, it was that she had to get far away and stay away. Here in his world she was trapped in an intolerable corner, which seemed to grow tighter and tighter each year. And now no place in America felt right.

Nicole Mones

#34. She pictured herself in a world without him, a world where she had only her own heart and mind to follow. A world open and blank with possibility; terrifying, almost.

Nicole Mones