Quotes from Larissa Lai

One must take human form to engage in human affairs. It was difficult.

This story is about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places. I leaned into the wall of the coiled cabin, snail, the body curled in upon itself, spine coiled, a snake lying in wait.

When you own nothing, it's hard to believe you have anything to lose.

We all know that joy and sorrow are entirely matters of fate and have nothing whatsoever to do with planning.

I did not understand the fierce love that drove [my father] any more than I understood his fears of a rapidly changing world. I was a sheltered child, living out of my parents' utopian dream as though it were reality. They did not show me the cracks. And out of loyalty and love for them, when I sensed the cracks, I refused to see them. But of course this unspoken pact could not last.

I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.

It was then that stories of the dreaming disease began to circulate more widely. We heard from our customers of a girl who smelled of cooking oil, who remembered all the wars ever fought. She could recall and recount every death, every rape, every wound, every moment of suffering that had ever been inflicted by a member of her ancestral lineage. The only place she could find relief from this barrage of collective memory was in water.

What is the value of human life? We are made up of so much water.

This story is about stink, after all, a story about rot, about how life grows out of the most fetid-smelling places.