Quotes from Yiyun Li

It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

The daughter who had escaped the sad fate envisioned by her mother had become a mother herself, and was now horrified that the ghost of her mother's fear had decided to make its home in her own heart.

Perhaps when I say I was expecting his suicide, it is only memory going back to revise itself. There is no reason an artistic and sensitive boy could not grow into a happy man. Where and how things went amiss with him I do not know, though even as a teenager, I recognized his despondency when at school the production of his play earned him jeers and a special exhibition of his car designs estranged him from his classmates. He was the kind of person who needed others to feel his existence.

How could you have thought of suicide when you have people you love? How could you have forgotten those who love you? These questions were asked, again and again. But love is the wrong thing to question. One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves.

Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision.

everyone has a story or two about that hard-earned lesson of giving more than is asked.

Is the wish to escape suffering selfish? It is considered so with suicide. But even less extreme escapes leave wounds in others' lives. The Death of the Heart is not only a study of selfishness, but also a study of the struggle to escape suffering. To whom the damage is done no one wants to ask. This is the question that unsettles me more: Is suffering selfish?

For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I'm reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.

There was the advantage in believing I was old already because it released me from having to be young. There was the possibility of death, which allowed one to bypass digressions into a life that had to be lived in detail. Pritchett called Turgenev's pessimism absolute. The absoluteness -- whether it is pessimism or optimism or fatalism -- is the most effective defense against what haunts one.

What makes you sad? What makes you angry? What makes you forget the good things in your life and your responsibilities toward others? One hides from people who ask these unanswerable questions only to ask them oneself again and again.

Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.

In retrospect little makes sense - perhaps all stories, rather than once-upon-a-time, should start this way.

and left. When the three children died in the same year she remained indifferent to Nikolai's loss. Worse than enduring a tyrannical parent is to be the favored child.

Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though is has ti 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.

A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.

The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. —W. H. AUDEN, "THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

Let us not be defeated by our fears before we are defeated by the enemy.

Bad things happen—wars, plagues, parents abandoning their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts—and no one, not a human or a god, will intervene.

How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring?

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

In ancient tales she could have been one of those divine creatures who borrow their mothers' wombs to enter the mortal world and make a name for themselves, as a heroine or a devil, depending on the intention of the heavenly powers.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

There is nothing selfish, dazzling, or preposterous about dreamers; in everyday life they blend in rather than stand out, though it's not hiding. A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

out of any world; each world is rimless. —Amy Leach, Things That Are She had always enjoyed waking people who were asleep; and indeed it is as great an alteration to the state of a fellow-creature that we can make short of killing them or giving birth to them. —Rebecca West, This Real Night