Quotes from Yiyun Li

A woman accepted anything from life and made it the best; a man bargained for the better but also the less perfect.

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one's neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one's hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

For some people a façade is necessary even with friends

McGahern's voice came in: 'I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything

There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.

The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.

I wished that life could be reset, but reset from when?

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?

small talk is for neighbors and families and maybe, in your case, coworkers. You don't waste your life having small talk with strangers.

sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty.

Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.

A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen's novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly.

A gilmpse into the depth of other people's misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that the suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another's suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life's necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one's private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.

Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed.

You cannot cut an apple with an apple. I have interrupted that living to write: the story of a faux-prodigy, which is the real story of Fabienne and Agnes, as real as on that day when we were in th graveyard, wanting, and unable, to kill each other; wanting, and unable, to save each other.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.