Quotes from Yiyun Li

Hardships in lives, Moran was raised to believe, are like unpleasant weather, which one endures because bad weather will break as inevitably as bad luck will run its course. Hope is the sunshine after the storm, the spring thawing after the bitter winter; the goddess of fate, capricious as she is, has nevertheless an impressionable mind, as any young female does, who would smile at those who have perseverance.

There is no point in waiting, as every moment is the right moment.

He himself feels happier at this moment than he remembers he ever did in his life. The woman in front of him, who loves everything with or without a good reason, seems happy, too.

All people lie, in their writing as much as in their lives. It frustrates me that I hold on to an unrealistic belief: there is some irrefutable truth in each mind, and the truth is told without concealment or distortion in a letter or in a journal entry.

balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you'd have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.

Sadness is a helpless garrison against the blindness of tragedy.

When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our old home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

Adjectives are my guitly pleasure.

I grew up with the dread of seeing piles of old newspapers collect dust and used matches put back into matchboxes. But more than that, I dreaded the memories that were not mine, yet were so adamant to be heard and remembered as the only memories that mattered.

Night for those sound sleepers was a cocoon against time. For me, I wanted to believe, it was even better. Time, at night, was my possession, not the other way around.

We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.

Lucky she was, she would reply, with no children to break her back, no husband to break her heart.

I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

I don't think truth ever tastes good to anyone's palate.

She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt.

If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. One prefers anyone - a mother, a lover, a friend - who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness.

All the same, the doll, like all dolls, cannot even be called dead, as it was never alive.

Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son.

America and fame: they are equally useful if you want freedom from your mother.

Big deals and climaxes only form a vacuum cleaner of time. It's the small deals and the nothing deals that shatter time into ragges pieces.

How do I measure Fabienne's presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

As their letters became increasingly melancholy, and as they - especially Stefan Zweig - increasingly refused to believe in any hope for themselves or for mankind, Eva was never included in that despair. This impunity is the same wishful thinking as when parents want to spare their children the difficulties they themselves have had to live through. Yet without that wishfulness, what are the parents doing but letting the melodrama of their own memories dictate the next generation's fate?

What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.

I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born.