Quotes from Yu Hua

Ah, gli uomini! Per quanto travagliata sia stata la loro esistenza, sanno ancora consolarsi in punto di morte.

revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution.

Jiazhen ha avuto una bella morte, serena, dignitosa. Non si è lasciata nessun'ombra alle spalle; non come certe donne del villaggio, che anche dopo morte sono oggetto di chiacchiere." Questo vecchio che mi sedeva di fronte usava un tono nel parlare della moglie morta più di dieci anni prima che destava nel mio intimo un senso di ineffabile tenerezza, come un prato verde che vacilla nel vento, vedevo la quiete ondeggiare in un luogo remoto.

Those immediately behind number 50 were anguish personified. They let loose an endless stream of foul language and it was hard to tell whether they were cursing themselves or cursing something else. My neighbours and I in the last third of the queue only felt a pang of disappointment whereas those who just missed out on the coupon were like people who see the duck that they had cooked flap its wings and fly away.

As we Chinese say, you don't have to pay tax on bullshit. That being so, why not bullshit to the max?

Travolto dalle emozioni, ripensai agli anni delle elementari e delle medie, quando ci obbligavano a leggerlo: non era una lettura per bambini, ma adatta a un lettore maturo e sensibile, A volte, serve l'occasione giusta per incontrare veramente uno scrittore.

Les hommes sont comme ça [...]. Ils mangent dans leur bol, mais ils gardent un œil sur la casserole.

Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That's because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.

It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write.

because my memory had caught up with the world that had gone away.

The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears

As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube.

You don't have to pay tax on bullshit

That is the real tragedy: poverty and hunger are not as shocking as willful indifference to them.

When I lay down on that clean concrete bed, I found the ideal place for an afternoon nap. On many baking afternoons that followed, if I saw that the morgue was not otherwise occupied, I would lie on the slab and savor its soothing coolness; sometimes in my dreams I would find myself in a garden full of blooming flowers.

Benim endi?em ?u ki, kand?rmak aleni bir ?ekilde insanlar?n ya?am ?ekli haline geldi?inde, bu ister bir ki?i olsun, ister bir ülke, herkes aldatman?n kurban? haline gelir.

In times like these, who had either the leisure or the inclination to indulge in a touch of elegance?

A parte de la vida misma, no veo otropa motivo para seguir viviendo.

Per la mia imbranataggine in materia, ero come una casa senza porte e finestre: l'amore faceva su e giù, io sentivo il rumore dei passi, ma credevo che fosse lì per caso e diretto altrove. Finché, un giorno, si fece avanti e suonò il campanello.

L'ho vista questa Gui Hua. Ha un sedere troppo grosso. Ti piacciono le chiappone, Gen Long?" chiese Xu Sanguan. Gen Long si mise a ridere e toccò ad A Fang parlare: "la donna col sedere grosso va bene. Stesa sul letto sembra una barca, è molto stabile.

Four other old folk emerged one by one to join their brother. All five siblings wore cheap polyester clothes, and standing in a group they looked very much alike. They differed only in their heights, like the fingers of a single hand.

Several times I ran into a crowd of [redacted], dozens of them. They were not like the other [redacted] that sometimes gathered together and sometimes separated--this crowd stayed consistently together as they walked, a little like the moon's reflection on water, which keeps floating in a discrete shape no matter how the waves tug.

La casetta si sta allontanando e i binari sono volati via. Continuo a perdermi inseguendo le mie tracce, e mi stanco. Mi siedo su una pietra, serafico come un albero. E i miei ricordi sembrano dei maratoneti mentre corrono al mondo che ho lasciato.

As I look back over China's sixty years under communism, I sense that Mao's Cultural Revolution and Deng's open-door reforms have given China's grassroots two huge opportunities: the first to press for a redistribution of political power and the second to press for a redistribution of economic power.