Top 48 Yiyun Li Quotes

#1. Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #7180
#2. Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #74779
#3. People don't vanish from one's life; they come back in disguise.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #86813
#4. What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #94845
#5. Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #113711
#6. Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #113822
#7. It was not about keeping a man; it was a lesson on how not to become an ugly woman.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #159353
#8. The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #171670
#9. Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #171890
#10. I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #206323
#11. But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others - a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #319791
#12. She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #365705
#13. He himself feels happier at this moment than he remembers he ever did in his life. The woman in front of him, who loves everything with or without a good reason, seems happy, too.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #400524
#14. Amazing how much one could take and then all of a sudden he broke."
"True.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #417951
#15. We live in a wrong time," Yang said.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #457890
#16. Persimmons are not born soft,"
"But they are valued for their softness."
"Their ripeness.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #469025
#17. A woman accepted anything from life and made it the best; a man bargained for the better but also the less perfect.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #511326
#18. When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #532275
#19. To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #623346
#20. Don't boast because you know too little," Mrs. Pang says.
"Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he'll become tomorrow.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #694400
#21. Bad things happen - wars, plagues, parents abandoning their children, the heartless preying on those with hearts - and no one, not a human or a god, will intervene.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #800742
#22. What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #830671
#23. The weak-minded choose to hate," she said. "It's the least painful thing to do, isn't it?

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #864179
#24. The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #868930
#25. But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?"
"Theirs.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #893527
#26. A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1005171
#27. I never showed up in her dreams, I am certain, as people we keep in our memories rarely have a place for us in theirs.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1006850
#28. When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1072004
#29. Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1078329
#30. I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy' - in Chinese or in English.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1113199
#31. Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1217618
#32. Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1404543
#33. I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1418290
#34. I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1419011
#35. She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1450422
#36. The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1464665
#37. Lucky she was, she would reply, with no children to break her back, no husband to break her heart.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1512187
#38. One man's mistake can capsize a whole ship of people."
"True.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1532512
#39. Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1705948
#40. They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1719404
#41. To say we know a person is to write that person off.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1720217
#42. But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1745054
#43. Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1751761
#44. Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1809648
#45. Our life, we realize, is not as happy as we have been taught to think.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1821472
#46. Does marriage have such a revolutionary power that a long-established habit can be overthrown in such a short time?

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1833412
#47. Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1834312
#48. She knew that in all stories she must be left out-the life she had made for herself was a life of flight, of discarding the inessential and the essential alike, making use of the stolen pieces and memories, retreating to the lost moments of other people's lives.

Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Quotes #1835315

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