Quotes from Yiyun Li

Parenthood is not some special currency," Iris said. "Being a parent is not a status thing." "Surely they're superior in one way? They've done things we've been unable to do." "What, procreation? The turkeys do it. All those dogs and cats do it. Your bees, too. Fuck and breed.

Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel.

Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.

It saddened her that Luo insisted on holding on to her as if they had started to share some vital organs during their twenty years of marriage. She wondered if this was a sign of old age, of losing hope and the courage for changes. She herself could easily picture vanishing from their shared life, but then perhaps it was a sign of aging on her part, a desire for loneliness that would eventually make death a relief.

The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: "My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language." That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy, to others.

The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

SOMETIMES YOU HEAR PEOPLE say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life. A day in a cloister can be as dramatic and fatal as a day on a battlefield.

Persimmons are not born soft," "But they are valued for their softness." "Their ripeness.

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

she knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

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

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

People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one's life, but that the only way to end the pain - that eternal fight against one's melodrama so that it does not transgress - is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments - Mann's or anyone's - on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.

Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not.

Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope

One man's mistake can capsize a whole ship of people." "True.

To kill time - an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

Wishing only wounds the heart.

Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.

Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don't show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn't make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.