Ha Jin Quotes

#1. To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.

Ha Jin

#2. You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.

Ha Jin

#3. Without answering, he pulled the comforter over his head. If only he could sleep a few days in a row. He felt sorry for himself and sick of everything.

Ha Jin

#4. Where should he go? He wanted to find a building out of which he could jump and kill himself. How about the temple? No, it only had two stories. Too low. How about the elementary school? No, his ghost might frighten the children if he died there, and people would condemn him.

Ha Jin

#5. But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art.

Ha Jin

#6. I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Ha Jin

#7. At home you could depend on your parents, but in America you are on your own and should make as many friends as you can . . . You don't know who may hold out a helpful hand in your hour of need.

Ha Jin

#8. Liya's letter threw her parents

Ha Jin

#9. In short, he must be loyal only to his art.

Ha Jin

#10. Life is a journey, and you can't carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

Ha Jin

#11. The more you move, the stronger you'll grow, not like a tree that can be killed if you uproot it.

Ha Jin

#12. I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile,

Ha Jin

#13. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

Ha Jin

#14. A good marriage was full of moments of cats and dogs. It was the uneventful marriage that was headed toward disaster. In a word, the differences between the husband and the wife should only help stabilize their marriage.

Ha Jin

#15. English has more flexibility. It's a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

Ha Jin

#16. Indifference is the strongest contempt.

Ha Jin

#17. No, It's hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it's also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

Ha Jin

#18. Once you've done it with him, he won't abandon you. If he really loves you, if he's a man with a heart, he'll follow you wherever you go. If he doesn't, he isn't the man you want, is he?

Ha Jin

#19. You said, 'Life is a tragedy, but its meaning lies in how we face the tragedy.

Ha Jin

#20. Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

Ha Jin