Shan Sa Quotes

#1. I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

Shan Sa

#2. Years have passed and how I am anxiously watching the twilight of my childhood, quietly sinking, never to rise again.

Shan Sa

#3. would you dare to love me?

Shan Sa

#4. Out on the street I start to run; I need to breathe in this life, the trees, the warmth of my town. I will be able to control my own fate and I will know how to be happy. Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle ...

Shan Sa

#5. Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis.

Shan Sa

#6. I talk to trees and animals. We have interesting conversations about food, weather, and love. They sometimes can predict the future.

Shan Sa

#7. The role of Empress became a full-time occupation.

Shan Sa

#8. I am like them-I want life. I want to go back to Manchuria, to find my house and my go table. I will return to the Square of a Thousand Winds and wait for my Stranger. I know he will come ... one afternoon ... as he did that first time.

Shan Sa

#9. Eventually I fall asleep, savoring the melancholy pleasures of victory. I wake with a start to a muffled sound: the wolves could not wait for us to withdraw; they are already devouring the bodies.

Shan Sa

#10. I must go live at the ends of the earth and have my child there while I wait for Min and Jing to be freed.
That happy day will come: two men making their way towards a little cottage lost in the open countryside.
The door opens ...

Shan Sa

#11. Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust.
Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?

Shan Sa

#12. Men's freedom is their unfaithfulness: the Son of Heaven or the son of a peasant, they could both reduce me to the mediocre torments of a woman.

Shan Sa

#13. The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude.

Shan Sa

#14. It has taken many years for the game of go to initiate me into the freedom of slipping between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. From one stone to the next, from black to white, the thousands of stones have ended up building a bridge far into the infinite expanse of China.

Shan Sa

#15. Politicians are better liars than writers.

Shan Sa

#16. I, the ordinary restless child, the plain adolescent, the commoner who had been a nun twice, would prove to be a Daughter of Heaven.

Shan Sa

#17. The world in which we live is no more real than a moon beam reflected in water drawn from the palm of the hand ...

Shan Sa

#18. The strength of the snow and the fire has turned you into a traveling magician. You heal people by holding their hands between yours, you make them forget the cold, hunger, sickness, and war.

Shan Sa

#19. The trees part before her slender form and close in again behind me. The roads weave a vast labyrinth, and I am lost.

Shan Sa

#20. Dying is so simple. A fleeting moment of suffering. In the blink of an eye you are over the threshold, into another world. No more pain, no more fears. You sleep so well there.
Dying is like rubbing snow together, setting fire to a whole winter of cold and ice.

Shan Sa

#21. Heroes are damned. No mortal conquers Death.

Shan Sa

#22. I succeeded in using my charms like a weapon; I learned to play with other's hearts and to master my own desires.

Shan Sa

#23. A man who does not like power will suffer from its cruelty.

Shan Sa

#24. Life is an infernal loop where the day before yesterday has merged with today, and yesterday has been jettisoned. We think we are moving forward in time, but we are always prisoners of the past.

Shan Sa

#25. I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty, nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge.
-the girl who played go

Shan Sa

#26. Every man has to die. Choosing oblivion is the only way of triumphing over this.

Shan Sa

#27. I try very hard to keep my eyes open so that I can look at my beloved.

Shan Sa

#28. I notice the silvery hair at his temples with a tinge of sadness. Why do parents grow old? Life is a castle of lies slowly dismantled by the passage of time. I regret not spending more time looking at the people I love.

Shan Sa

#29. My position at the Palace is our one opportunity. Have confidence in my destiny. Do not weep.

Shan Sa

#30. I hand the cage to him and he takes it firmly in his arms.
'Your hankie smells nice,' he says, almost in a whisper.

Shan Sa

#31. When I get out of the rickshaw I walk slowly towards the school building, taking small steps. All around me girls are running: in the morning the young are as noisy as a flock of sparrows.

Shan Sa

#32. I am terrified by the dizzying pleasure of it: I am both here and over there; I am be and I am no longer me!
Am I already dead?

Shan Sa

#33. To other women the choice of clothes was a form of ingenious exhibition, a shameless seduction. To me, dresses were like a breastplate that I put on to set off to war against this life.

Shan Sa

#34. I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth.

Shan Sa

#35. I reply with a letter as brief as his: 'My brother, after my first battle the only thing I now worship is the sun, a star that represents death's constancy. Beware of the moon, which reflects our world of beauty. It waxes and wanes, it is treacherous and ephemeral. We will all die some day ...

Shan Sa

#36. I have written too much about lives - I feel I have lived for too long.

Shan Sa

#37. The winter light, tinted by the bright colors in the street, plays on the go-board. All these festivities cut me off from the rest of the world. My loneliness is like a bolt of crimson silk stowed in the bottom of a wooden chest.

Shan Sa

#38. Love has been buried forever under the leaves at my feet. I lie down on the ground and rest my head on my bag. The grass tickles my arms where I bend the stalks under my neck.
I want to sleep.

Shan Sa

#39. I splash my head with ice-cold water and turn to face the mirror. When my image appears I instinctively look away.
Is there a truth on the other side that we do not want to see?

Shan Sa

#40. Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle like a game of go. I will take hold of all the pain and snuff it out.

Shan Sa