Yiyun Li Quotes

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

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

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.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

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.

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.

I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

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.

I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.

There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.

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

If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.

There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

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.

No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.

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.

Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.

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

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

The weak-minded choose to hate, " she said. "It's the least painful thing to do, isn't it?

There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

People don't vanish from one's life they come back in disguise.