Quotes from Eileen Chang

Life is an extravagant gown, riddled with lice.

Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...

In that little pocket-size world of his, he was the absolute master.

She wasn't a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen — a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy satin. The years passed; the bird's feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.

Shijun, we can't go back.

Thinking is painful business.

Oh, it's not important. It's just a glove!" Manzhen spoke lightly, but in fact she was upset. Sometimes she focused so hard on little things she was almost small-minded. But Shijun, when he looked back at it all, treasured this trait of hers. Manzhen was the kind of person who, once something came into her possession, cherished it till it became, in her eyes, the best thing ever. He knew, because he'd once been hers.

If you knew the old me, maybe you could forgive the current me.

You meet the one you meet amongst thousands and tens of thousands of people, amidst thousands and tens of thousands of years, in the boundless wilderness of time, not a step sooner, not a step later. You chance upon each other, not saying much, only asking softly, "Oh, you are here, also?

I want you to know there's someone in this world who's yours always. Please know that, forever and wherever. Yours, always

Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.

Her voice, her smile, her every gesture was utterly familiar to him: these traces of her presence had danced in his dreams for years, and now he beheld them with waking eyes. Fate is cruel, but it's a cruelty that suffuses sweetness into the suffering.

Opening her handbag, she took out a small bottle of perfume and touched the stopper behind her ears. Its cool, glassy edge felt like her only point of contact with tangible reality.

Small white clouds floated in the blue sky above, and on the street a flute vendor was playing the flute - a sharp, soft, sinuous, Oriental tune that twisted and turned in the ear like embroidery, like a picture of a dream in a novel, a trail of white mist coming out from under the bed curtain and unfurling all sorts of images, slowly uncoiling like a lazy snake, till finally the drowsiness is just too great, and even the dream falls asleep.

Her broken sentences hung in midair like the pendulums of several clocks, each ticking along at a different speed, each following its own logic and reaching its own conclusions, each rising up at a different moment, each hammering its bell at a different time....

She'd asked him, back then, when he'd first started liking her. "The moment I first saw you," he'd replied, of course. His feelings were running so high then, he'd have believed anything. He was certain he was not lying. But in fact, the moment when he first saw her was not all that clear in his mind.

In truth, every time she was with Yee she felt cleansed, as if by a scalding hot bath; for now everything she did was for the cause.

They simply had to fill this terrifying emptiness–otherwise, their brains might start working. Thinking is painful business.

Her hands felt cold, but she was somehow warmed by the sound of a familiar voice.

The times are rushing ahead. This has already caused damage, and there is still more destruction to come. One day, human civilization... will be a thing of the past.

Maybe every man has two such women—at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.

The moon of thirty years ago has gone down long since and the people of thirty years ago are dead but the story of thirty years ago is not yet ended—can have no ending.

Fundamental truth is unyielding, like a mountain.

He had no desire to discuss Manzhen with anyone: talking about it would only miss the point, like scratching a shoe to get at an itchy spot underneath the leather.