Quotes from Yiyun Li

Dreams are but prologue to days, epilogue to other days, written by our faltering minds.

There's a reason for every relationship, that's what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one's on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don't end up randomly as father and daughter, that's for sure.

The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,

but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory.

Yet in retrospect, with the present to vindicate the past, everyone can claim the illusory status of being a seer.

Can a wall describe its own dimensions and texture, can a wall even sense its own existence, if not for the ball that constantly bounces off of it?

Amazing how much one could take and then all of a sudden he broke." "True.

recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction.

Reading Turgenev":

contemporaries,

Only later, when I met more girls, when I got to know my nieces and nephews, did I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.

we are solitary travelers, having crossed paths in the land of stories.

People were the most dangerous animals in the world, Teacher Gu thought of telling his daughter during that visit ten years ago; stay small and unimportant, like a grain of dust,

All the girls, other than me, wanted the same things: to own a pair of stockings so their legs would not look bare and childish in their humiliating ankle socks; to have the best notebooks to record song lyrics, those sickeningly sweet words of dreams and loves and hearts; to be praised by the teachers, but more importantly, to be admired and envied by one another; to catch the attention of the right boys.

Does marriage have such a revolutionary power that a long-established habit can be overthrown in such a short time?

A dreamer: it's the last thing I want to be called, in China or in America. No doubt when my friend in Beijing used the term, she was thinking of traits like persistence, single-mindedness, willfulness, and—particularly—impracticality, which she must have seen plenty of in me. Still, that one possesses a dreamer's personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.

who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other?

Our life, we realize, is not as happy as we have been taught to think.

Two people who are constantly seeking experience rarely settle for each other. Two people enduring experience rarely meet in life. That's why Fabienne and I were meant for each other. We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience.

It was not about keeping a man; it was a lesson on how not to become an ugly woman.

They were all sufferers in their despicable pain, every one of them, and what right did he have to laugh at the woman whose husband was pouring his heart out to him, a man in sincere confession to a fellowman?

They'll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?

In a minefield a blind person is not more likely to be killed than a person who can see." I thought about it, and realized that she was right. Still, I told her, I would not want us to be blind. But were we not, in a sense, two blind girls? One would walk everywhere as though not a single mine were buried in the field. The other would not find the courage to take a step because the whole world was a minefield.

I would have liked to be called a dreamer had I known how to dream. The sense of being an imposter, I understand, occurs naturally, and those who do not occasional feel so I find untrustworthy. I would not mind being taken as many things I am not: a shy person, a cheerful person, a cold person. But I do not want to be called a dreamer when I am far from being a real one.