Quotes from Xiaolu Guo

I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day.

I felt an urge to conquer this new village.

They think there are only two kinds of young women in China: good girls or prostitutes.

Everything around me was changing so fast—my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere. Okay, so I was getting lots of work, but it was all the same. Woman Waiting on the Platform, Lady in Waiting, Bored Waitress. I was only in my twenties, but I felt seventy. I had to do something, ask my brain to start working, so I could match this fast-moving city.

English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese.

My youth began when I was 21. At least, that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life - some of them might possibly be for me.

Mrs. Margaret sigh heavy. Then she standing up, and starting make her own tea. She drink it in very thirsty way, like angry camel in the desert.

Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, these cockroaches were sadomasochists, looking for the most painful way to die. Once I swallowed one absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatised, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.

Humans need cages around their bodies – wombs, houses, coffins.

I couldn't believe a mother and her daughter could have so much to say to each other. In my family, no one talked. In my family, people lived like insects, like worms, like slugs hanging on the back door of the house.

I became a person who was very good at hiding her emotions. Maybe that was why people thought I was heartless. Apparently my face often had a blank expression. Huizi, my most intellectual friend, would say, "Fenfang, yours is the face of a post-modern woman.

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

When I left my village, it was like I took a step with my right foot and, by the time my left foot came to join it, four years had passed.

bu wen bu rou wen zi, wen zi bu ruo jian zhi. jian zhi bu ruo zhi zi, zhi zi bu ruo xing zi. Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. But involve me, I will understand. XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)

In all my time in Beijing, I'd never managed to have a female friend. It seemed every woman in this city was busy either with her kids or with her mortgage.

Once love is brought down to earth, and weighed, it's over, it's dead. – But don't you agree that real love is the love that's brought down to earth? It's only real when it's mixed up with dirt and sweat. Otherwise, it's just for puppies and adolescents!

Each leaf had shuddered in the wind on any given yesterday. Each cloud drifting overhead had blown across those skies the year before. Nothing had changed, and nothing could change. The world felt frozen in front of me, like a family photo trapped in a frame. This landscape had imprisoned me since I was born.

It was the same feeling I had when I first got to Britain. How many times could one restart a life? "I read that in China, people will transplant large number of trees and bring them to the newly developed cities. Chinese people seem to be very adaptable, like the trees." You were trying to comfort me. "Yes, but once the trees grew older, you can't transplant them again. The roots are too embedded into the ground.

Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn't be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn't be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest.

Don't worry, she deserved it anyway. She's no good, that girl. Much too individualistic.

What do you mean by wu-wo?' you asked. 'It's like no self. No I. Non-existence,' I answered. 'My body is here, but I don't feel I am here, right now. I don't feel my existence in this environment.

You could walk from North Tai Ping Zhuang over to the North Entrance of He Ping Street, and you may as well have smoked your way through two packs of Camels. You smoked the taxi driver's smoke as he spun sharply around a corner, you smoked the local party leader's smoke as he tried to establish order at a meeting, you smoked your boyfriend's smoke whether he loved you or not. Chinese-made cigarettes, foreign imports, dodgy rip-offs. The city was in a permanent fog.

At least you're still learning a lot. Even if everything is broken.

The road home is a long one. As I walk this road, I recall my grandmother's words: "Everyone has a past life, a future life and a present life.