Quotes from Han Suyin

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

And there is not anything in the world stronger than tenderness.

Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.

This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don't, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down.

I really can't hate more than 5 or 10 years. Wouldn't it be terrible to be always burdened with those primary emotions you had at one time?

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Love can never explain the loved one, my dear. It is the essence of wild unreason.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.

There is nothing stronger in this world than gentleness.

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other." - The Mountain is Young

One should never condemn what one cannot understand.

Whatever has happened, there is always that magic winter haunting and hurting me with its marvelous echoes. The shortest days of the year, when nothing had begun and nothing had ended, all the roads of life were alive, and time beat round me like a heart.

I wouldn't know where pure emotion, a crush as you say, stops and sex begins. Does anyone know? When does a feeling become a sin? When the body performs what is already formed in the mind? Tell me that, Red?

She alone would do a mad and wonderful thing like that, ringing me up. No one else ever did things like that for me. I always had had to do the ringing up and the asking, and going to people's rooms, always I was the one to ask for love.

You sap our self-confidence until we exist merely to court your approval (...) You keep us perpetually off balance, unpleasantly aware of our inferiority, and that's the whole secret of your skill and power.

Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent today, already he is here for me." - The Mountain is Young

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.

And that's what Mahudin calls our thought control...an induced hypnosis of inferiority, destroying confidence and initiative, prolonging the period of tutelage which we would like to go on forever...

Hearsay was far more important than knowledge[...]for it is easier to appear knowledgeable than to become so.

Politics don't stop love. He will say to her: "You are as beautiful as our new hydro-electric plant." And she will reply: "Comrade, how progressive of you.