Barry Hughart Quotes

#1. Master Li turned bright red while he scorched the air with the Sixty Sequential Sacrileges with which he had won the all-China Freestyle Blasphemy Competition in Hangchow three years in a row.

Barry Hughart

#2. Occasionally a moderately intelligent thought misses a turn and accidentally enters my mind

Barry Hughart

#3. Boy, just look at the soul shining through my eyes! It's like a goddamned flower!

Barry Hughart

#4. Begin at the beginning as you understood it, proceed through the middle, continue to the end, and then stop, said Master Li, and he sauntered out to get drunk ...

Barry Hughart

#5. Miser Shen is preparing to spend the night with a goat.

Barry Hughart

#6. Show me a quest for personal immortality and I'll show you a path through a slaughterhouse, and the incense of personal divinity is the stench of other people's corpses.

Barry Hughart

#7. ...Men cannot come any closer to immortality without going insane.

Barry Hughart

#8. Blessed are the idiots, for they are happiest people on earth.

Barry Hughart

#9. To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned.

Barry Hughart

#10. A fool will study for twenty or thirty years and learn how to do something, but a wise man will study for twenty or thirty minutes and become an expert. In this world, it isn't ability that counts, but authority.

Barry Hughart

#11. Master Li, how are we going to murder a man who laughs at axes?" I asked.
We are going to experiment, dear boy. Our first order of business will be to find a deranged alchemist, which should not be very difficult. China," said Master Li, "is overstocked with deranged alchemists.

Barry Hughart

#12. Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.

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#13. Error can point the way to truth, while empty-headedness can only lead to more empty-headedness or to a career in politics.

Barry Hughart

#14. Ox, at an early age a Chinese genius gazes at the path that lies ahead and reaches for a wine jar," Master Li said. "Is it any wonder that our greatest men have lurched rather than walked across the landscape as they hiccuped their way into history?

Barry Hughart

#15. Ox, what occupation is most closely linked to insanity?'
'Emperor,' I said promptly.

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#16. Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real...

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#17. The mind is a miser," he said. "Nothing is ever thrown away, and it's amazing what you can find if you dig deep enough.

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#18. The problem with poetic justice is that it never knows when to stop.

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#19. The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science," he observed mildly ... "Come on, Ox, let's go out and get killed.

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#20. 'Immortality is only for the gods,' he whispered. 'I wonder how they can stand it.'

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#21. Everybody knows that the soul of a cat is formed from the composite souls of nine debauched nuns who failed in their vows.

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#22. Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny.

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#23. The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.

Barry Hughart

#24. Fable has strong shoulders that carry far more truth than fact can.

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#25. The emotional health of a village depended upon having a man whom everyone loved to hate, and Heaven had blessed us with two of them.

Barry Hughart

#26. Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it.

Barry Hughart

#27. It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship.

Barry Hughart