Quotes from Xiaolu Guo

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.

About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing. I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.

But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.

Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '?' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.

Never look back to the past, never regret, even if there is emptiness ahead.' But I couldn't help it. Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness.

I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.

But what so different of eating plants? Everything has it's life. If you are so pure, why not just stop eating? So you can have no shit?

The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want to be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow,

In China we believe "rob the rich to feed the poor." But robbers here have no poetry.

Maybe I not need feeling lonely, because I can talk to other "me." Is like seeing my two pieces of lips speaking in two languages at same time. Yes, I not lonely, because I with another me. Like Austin Powers with his Mini Me

I don't feel naked around you anymore.

Everyone tries to be an optimist. But being an optimist is a bit boring and not honest. Losers are more interesting than winners.

Red's world, you see, is a closed circle. Not that it matters. I know that I'm a closed circle, too, and it's all I can do to find some starting point from myself, while at the same time trying to find my own terminus. There's no way I'm ever going to find my beginning or end in somebody else's circle. Two people together never add up to anything more than one person added to another. That we continue to add ourselves up in this way is the reason human beings will always be lonely.

People desperately want to spend their money. Maybe they think that's the most effective way to feel alive.

In China we say, "You can't expect both ends of a sugar cane are as sweet." Sometimes love can be ugly. But one still has to take it and swallow it.

Hot coffee is like a warm-blooded man. They both give you the courage to face a new day.

Yours is the face of a post-modern woman.

I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?

If I'm sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I'd cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn't stand it and I'd swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a clidd. So, I come here instead where there's so much water already I can weep in peace.

We were like family - family members always hurt each other. And Ben was not my family, he lived for himself. A Western body when Ben and I slept together, he could forget all about the love that was lying next to him in the dark. I felt he didn't need much warmth from anybody. His own 37.2º C were sufficient for him. His spirit slept alone.

Heavenly Bastard in the Sky