The Mandarin Quotes

#1. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

Roland Barthes

#2. The memories of long love gather like drifting snow, poignant as the mandarin ducks who float side by side in sleep.

Murasaki Shikibu

#3. One Hyde Park squatted next to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel like a stack of office furniture, and with all the elegance and charm of the inside of a photocopier. Albeit a brand new photocopier that doubled as a fax and document scanner.

Ben Aaronovitch

#4. Yearns creep upon the mandarin glow dipping into the horizon, bound to incarnate all the sleepy heads awakening around the globe.

C.C. Wyatt

#5. In London, I really like going to the Mandarin Oriental. They can even do my feet without tickling me.

Lara Stone

#6. The most sensible skill that I can give to somebody born in 2003 is a perfect command of Mandarin.

Jim Rogers

#7. No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Joshua Foer

#8. On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something.

David Sedaris

#9. The next movie will be in Mandarin. I enjoyed shooting all the Japanese stuff in Kill Bill so much that this whole film will be entirely in Mandarin.

Quentin Tarantino

#10. A golf ball is white, dimpled like a bishop's knees, and is the size of small mandarin oranges or those huge pills which vets blow down the throats of constipated cart-horses.

Frank Muir

#11. I just started taking Mandarin classes. I love the idea of globalization: of being able to work in different countries.

Sandrine Holt

#12. We would never ask a hearing student to comprehend a lecture in Mandarin if he or she did not have proficiency in the language. Nevertheless, we ask this feat of deaf children everyday.

Christine Monikowski

#13. I needed an adult female wearing a tight sleeveless cheongsam mini-dress to help me learn Chinese. All my senses would have to focus; otherwise I would end up knowing nothing. Tracing each Chinese character upon the small of her back with my index finger was only proper way to begin a lesson.

Matt Muller

#14. There are a lot of colloquialisms in the Cantonese language that can never be represented aptly in Mandarin.

Jia Zhangke

#15. Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

Evan Osnos

#16. I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

Vera Wang

#17. Back in the car she said, "I think I die this year, maybe this month." "I die first," Jiichan replied. "Japanese women live to nineties." "I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C." "You drink more green tea. You live longer.

Cynthia Kadohata

#18. French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.

David Graddol

#19. Mandarin is gonna be the language in 15 to 20 years.

Stephon Marbury

#20. Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

John McWhorter

#21. I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next.

Quentin Tarantino

#22. Beneath the light, the river and hills are beautiful, The spring breeze bears the fragrance of flowers and grass. The mud has thawed, and swallows fly around. On the warm sand, mandarin ducks are sleeping.

Du Fu

#23. For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.

Daniel Wu

#24. One suit for the White Devil!" in Mandarin,

Christopher Moore

#25. On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin.

Neal Stephenson

#26. Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there's only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it.

Georgia Clark

#27. Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

David Tang

#28. Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

Katherine Paterson

#29. I majored in Chinese Studies. I'm probably the only director of chicken Indian zombie movies who can speak pretty good Mandarin.

Lloyd Kaufman

#30. I figured Katie was likely swimming in blood. Ick. I looked at the moon and judged that the bloodletting took over two hours before Sabina called a halt by saying words I didn't understand, in French, or Latin, or Mandarin for all I knew.

Faith Hunter