Yu Hua Quotes

#1. It was just as summer arrived that I met an old man named Fugui.

Yu Hua

#2. Three or four years ago, a city education bureau announced a new measure to raise the quality of local teachers and enable graduating high school seniors to be more competitive in the university entrance examination.

Yu Hua

#3. No matter how lucky a person is, the moment he decides he wants to die, there's nothing that will keep him alive.

Yu Hua

#4. In times like these, who had either the leisure or the inclination to indulge in a touch of elegance?

Yu Hua

#5. Your life is given to you by your parents. If you don't want to live, you have to ask them first.

Yu Hua

#6. At first, writing actually felt the more arduous of the two activities. But in order to reach cultural-center nirvana, I forced myself to continue. I was young then and it was no easy matter to persuade my bottom to maintain such constant intimacy with my chair

Yu Hua

#7. My mother often said, as long as a person is happy at work, then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of.

Yu Hua

#8. ... because my memory had caught up with the world that had gone away.

Yu Hua

#9. As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube.

Yu Hua

#10. The emperor beckons me; he wants me to marry his daughter.
The road to the capital is long and distant; I don't want her.

Yu Hua

#11. People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat. Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.

Yu Hua

#12. It's better to live an ordinary life. If you go on striving for this and that, you'll end up paying with your life.

Yu Hua

#13. With relief I arrived at memory's peak,
and a broader landscape came into view.

Yu Hua

#14. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.

Yu Hua

#15. revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution.

Yu Hua

#16. You don't have to pay tax on bullshit

Yu Hua

#17. My emotional state then was cramped and confined, like a room with tightly sealed windows and doors: although love's footsteps could be heard outside the room, I felt they were steps heading somewhere else--until one day when the steps came to a halt and the bell rang.

Yu Hua

#18. We were fishers of memory waiting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the date.

Yu Hua

#19. The more boldly a man dares, the more richly his land bears

Yu Hua