Quotes from Yiyun Li

You're the only one more impractical than he was, she said; you should know this is not a country for dreamers.

what is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive? Let me tell you—history is, unlike what they say on the loudspeakers, not driven by revolutionary force but by people's desire to climb up onto someone else's neck and shit and pee as he or she wants. Enough bad things are done by men already, but if you add women to the equation, one might as well wish not to bring a baby into this world.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother's stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?

This is what I know: if we stopped writing now, we would never make it to Paris," Fabienne said. "You see, it's like a game. We don't know when the game is going to be over, but since we've already begun, and since we don't have another game to play just now, we may as well stick with this one.

perhaps we could take the liberty to believe, for all we know, that this era may last for the next hundred years?—is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever.

The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang's back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.

But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.

Who can say to love doesn't also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said.

There could be many different Chinese characters for a name like hers, she explained. The characters her parents had chosen for her meant quietness. "Silence?" she tried again, sounding out the word, but then said the meaning was more like reticence. "It means for someone to choose not to express an opinion, to refrain from speaking.

Tarde o temprano será preciso renunciar a lo que tenemos por lo que creemos.

When people talk about starting over, it's only wishful thinking: what came before, what happened yesterday, did not come or happen in vain.

There is never as good a parent as the one who doesn't give birth to a child,

he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men's desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.

It had never occurred to Teacher Gu that he and his wife were to pay for the bullet that would take their daughter's life, but why question such absurdity when it was not his position to ask?

I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we kep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

What I own is my fortune; what I'm owed is my fate,

Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else's thought

Most men are undertakers of their women's dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men's dreams, too.

To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too.

A glimpse into the depth of other people's misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another's suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.

Lilia's mother had married the wrong man. It was like boarding a train that never takes you in the right direction, let alone to the destination you have in mind. The farther it travels, the less point there is in going on, and the lesser in getting off.

Rather, I want one day to be able to say to myself: Dear friend, we have waited this out.

I cannot give without questioning my motives. Does giving have to do with generosity, or with the selfish comfort it brings? The self-deception it offers, when the truth is one has little, or nothing, to give? If one keeps giving, will one be good enough to be loved one day?