If you can't change your fate, change your attitude. - Amy Tan

I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not.

What do you think was the very first sound to become a word, a meaning?' ... And then I realized what the first word must have been: ma, the sound of a baby smacking its lips in search of her mother's breast. Ma, ma, ma. Then the mother decided that was her name and she began to speak, too. She taught the baby to be careful: sky, fire, tiger. A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

All of us are like stairs, one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.