Matthew Polly Quotes & Sayings

A club hurts the flesh, but evil words hurt the bone. -Traditional Chinese Proverb — Matthew Polly

This was not uncommon in government-run operations, where a request that someone do their job often induced a catatonic state that might last anywhere from a couple of minutes to an hour. — Matthew Polly

The rural Chinese in Henan Province mixed alcohol and business like you wouldn't believe. Perhaps as a result, they also had a charming nationalistic blind spot: they honestly believed they could out-drink everyone else on the planet. As an Irish-American who outweighed them by 50 pounds, I had come to find this both amusing and useful. — Matthew Polly

A fight forms a powerful and strange bond between men. — Matthew Polly

[ ... ] it doesn't take much courage to fight when you still believe you can win. What takes real courage is to keep fighting when all hope is gone. — Matthew Polly

[ ... ] The monks sped up the process up for us laowai who have less time, less patience for basics, and a greater need for external markers of our accomplishments. — Matthew Polly

Only those who have tasted the bitterest of the bitter can become people who stand out among others. -Guanchang Xianxing Ji — Matthew Polly

When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models. — Matthew Polly

It is only when a person gets into difficulty that one can truly see his heart. — Matthew Polly

It is difficult for my fellow countrymen who have never lived abroad to understand that until a foreign man is about sixty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he'd like to punch an American in the face. Even people like the Chinese, who mostly like us, think of us
at least partly
as loud, fat, poorly dressed, overprivileged, hectoring, naive, arrogant, self-righteous bullies with little knowledge and no interest in any culture other than our own. I once had a conversation with a Japanese journalist who said to me, "You don't seem like an American." When I asked him, slightly hurt, why he said that, he replied, "Because you listen. — Matthew Polly

The sayers do not know and the knowers do not say. — Matthew Polly