Dai Sijie Quotes

#1. I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.

Dai Sijie

#2. She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.

Dai Sijie

#3. A name with a gently exotic ring to it, like birdsong, like a grain of sand in the far-off Gobi Desert or the northern steppes, whipped up by the wind, carried by storms, swirling through the sky, travelling, crossing whole countries without knowing quite how, and ending up in the crook of my ear.

Dai Sijie

#4. Our imagination is dictated by who we are. (198)

Dai Sijie

#5. We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.

Dai Sijie

#6. Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao

Dai Sijie

#7. Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but ... also betrays his heart rate, his breathing.

Dai Sijie

#8. In Chinese love stories the one who loves always starts by borrowing a book from the beloved.

Dai Sijie

#9. By the time we arrived the film had already started, and there was only standing room left behind the screen, where everything was in reverse and everyone was left-handed.

Dai Sijie

#10. It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.

Dai Sijie

#11. I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Dai Sijie

#12. In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was.

Dai Sijie