Quotes from Yiyun Li

Stripped of audience, originality would be much less at ease with itself.

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one's self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.

She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

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

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.