Quotes from Xiaolu Guo

This was Beijing. A city that never showed its gentle side. You'd die if you didn't fight with it, and there was no end to the fight. Beijing was a city for Sisyphus—you could push and push and push, but ultimately that stone was bound to roll back on you.

My soul is dancing. If happiness is a brief matter, then I am in this brief moment. I wonder whether the sadness inside a human sometimes is just because of lack of sunlight.

We die, governments change, ideologies evolve, borders disappear, rivers merge, islands sink, trees rot, bones dissolve, even nature expires one day. But the universe exists, with stars or without stars, with air or without air, infinitely and unimaginably beyond man. I know that the infinite world is there beyond trivial ideologies or politics. And we only have one life to live.

I want to see where you live.", I say. "You look in my eyes. "Be my guest." *** That's how all start. From a misunderstanding. When you say "guest" i think you meaning I can stay in your house. A week later, I move out from Chinese landlord.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street. 'AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING', W. H. AUDEN

A solid family life, no romance, and I knew there would never be any.

If you spend enough time reading someone else's thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call 'you'.

Huizi barely called anyone. He didn't get too involved with the details of his friends' lives. He was private, shut tight like a fortress. His short crew-cut and refined manners gave him the air of a Buddhist monk. Huizi would say never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.

I felt he didn't need much warmth from anybody. His own 37.5º C were sufficient for him. His spirit slept alone. I thought about how, after Ben and I made love he'd turn his body away from me. His naked back would face me. Even though our bodies were just two or three centimeters apart, I couldn't bear that distance. I felt abandoned and sometimes, in the dark, I couldn't help myself, I missed Xiaolin. I missed nights with Xiaolin.

I was in a vicious cycle: writing and reading seemed to be the only way to beat back the loneliness, but they also reinforced it

but the banging was fascist—a sound conveying force and authority—and I knew I would have to answer.

Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.