Quotes from Peter Hessler

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.

But our here and now is just a blip along the continuum.

a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.

a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering

There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland

Usually I said nothing at all; as a waiguoren I was often most comfortable when I was listening.

even though much of what America believed about itself was also fraudulent, at least the press and publishers could express unorthodox views.

I was fighting fire with fire, and I responded to propaganda with more of the same.

appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation.

Do you have places like this in your country? Wang Yumei asked. I tried to imagine having a reunion with my friends in America and picking up a random foreigner and spending the day with him, simply out of curiosity and kindness. No,...

They were survivors - there was a quiet strength to the congregation, and they had none of the well-dressed smugness of American churchgoers. All of them had paid for their faith, in ways that money could not measure, and Father Li had paid the most of all.

Wang Chaosu shouted everything at me, the way many Americans do when they meet foreigners with bad English.

And I said nothing about how in the child's fear I had seen reflection of all the difficulties that I had ever encountered in Fuling, the people's uncertainty about things new and strange. It was a natural, helpless, human response - an instinct as blameless as a child's. It took time and effort to deal with that, as well as patience, and now I realized how much work had been done on the other side.

Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That

In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother's responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn't want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.

When the cadres banned his students from singing any actual Christmas carols in a stage version of ''A Christmas Carol,'' he had them substitute patriotic Communist songs -- which actually improved Dickens: ''My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out 'The East Is Red,' singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, 'Humbug!

For some reason, it had become a tradition for tourists to throw money into the hole in front of the Sphinx. Of all the strange things that foreigners and rich Egyptians did at the ancient sites, this ritual most impressed Sayyid and his family.

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.

There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.

In Manchuria, I had learned one important fact about propaganda: the key information isn't what you put in, but what you leave out.

A dusty calendar was marked with the slogan TOMORROW WILL BE EVEN BETTER. It seemed ominous that the calendar was three years old.

The words of history are also the words of war.

to see the real thing in the right place - it was special. It left a very important mark in my memory.

I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of non-ferrous metal... Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system.