Best 49 quotes of Yiyun Li on MyQuotes

Yiyun Li

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    Yiyun Li

    Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.

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    Yiyun Li

    A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

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    Yiyun Li

    Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

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    Yiyun Li

    Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

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    Yiyun Li

    Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

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    Yiyun Li

    In China, your freedom is always limited, but this limitation applies to almost everyone. If someone does injustice to you, though, you have to find a way to avenge yourself - even by illegal measures. In a sense, injustice is more personal. This idea has always been in Chinese history. I think we read about freedom of speech, or lack of freedom of speech, in China so often. But I don't think people here in America think about how justice, or the idea of justice, is so important in a Chinese setting. It's probably more important than freedom of speech in the Chinese mindset at this moment.

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    Yiyun Li

    In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.

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    Yiyun Li

    I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.

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    Yiyun Li

    It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

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    Yiyun Li

    I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.

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    Yiyun Li

    One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.

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    Yiyun Li

    Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

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    Yiyun Li

    The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

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    Yiyun Li

    Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.

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    Yiyun Li

    But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?" "Theirs.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    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?

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    Yiyun Li

    If a person is not living for others, it does not mean he knows how to live for himself. One prefers anyone - a mother, a lover, a friend - who knows how to live for herself. Such knowledge is not selfishness.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one's real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one's days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.

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    Yiyun Li

    It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.

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    Yiyun Li

    Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: "My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language." That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy, to others.

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    Yiyun Li

    Once in a while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. "You may not remember me," these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten.

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    Yiyun Li

    Only by fully preparing oneself for people's absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. It has not occurred to me, until I met Trevor, to ask: 'Will I see you again?' What had precluded me from asking is this: 'Perhaps I won't see you again, and if so, goodbye for now and goodbye forever.

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    Yiyun Li

    Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.

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    Yiyun Li

    Patient stated that she felt like a burden to loved ones" - much later, when I read the notes from the emergency room, I did not have any recollection of the conversation. 'A burden to loved ones': this language must have been provided to me. I would never use the phrase in my thinking or writing. But my resistance has little to do with avoiding a platitude. To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people's lives: to call them loved ones is to fake one's ability to love. One does not always want to subject oneself to self-interrogation imposed by a cliché.

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    Yiyun Li

    People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one's life, but that the only way to end the pain - that eternal fight against one's melodrama so that it does not transgress - is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments - Mann's or anyone's - on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.

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    Yiyun Li

    There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

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    Yiyun Li

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

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    Yiyun Li

    This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.

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    Yiyun Li

    To kill time - an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.

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    Yiyun Li

    To say we know a person is to write that person off.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.

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    Yiyun Li

    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.