Yiyun Li Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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. — 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. — 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. — Yiyun Li

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

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

Our life, we realize, is not as happy as we have been taught to think. — Yiyun Li

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

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

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

It saddened her that Luo insisted on holding on to her as if they had started to share some vital organs during their twenty years of marriage. She wondered if this was a sign of old age, of losing hope and the courage for changes. She herself could easily picture vanishing from their shared life, but then perhaps it was a sign of aging on her part, a desire for loneliness that would eventually make death a relief. — Yiyun Li

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time. — Yiyun Li

We live in a wrong time," Yang said. — Yiyun Li

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

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

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

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. — 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. — Yiyun Li

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

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong. — Yiyun Li

Sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty. — 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? — 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. — 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. — 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. — Yiyun Li

The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool, — Yiyun Li

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

One man's mistake can capsize a whole ship of people."
"True. — 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. — Yiyun Li

Amazing how much one could take and then all of a sudden he broke."
"True. — Yiyun Li

Persimmons are not born soft,"
"But they are valued for their softness."
"Their ripeness. — Yiyun Li

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucky she was, she would reply, with no children to break her back, no husband to break her heart. — 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. — Yiyun Li

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

She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt. — Yiyun Li

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

People don't vanish from one's life; they come back in disguise. — 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. — Yiyun Li

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

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

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

His mother had always been a headstrong woman, and with her grayish-white mane and unsmiling face, she appeared as regal and intimidating as she had ever been. Still, seeing her through other people's eyes, Hanfeng realized that all that made her who she was - the decades of solitude in her widowhood, her coldness to the prying eyes of people who tried to mask their nosiness with friendliness, and her faith in the notion of living one's own life without having to go out of one's way for other people - could be deemed pointless and laughable. Perhaps the same could be said of any living creature: a caterpillar chewing on a leaf, unaware of the beak of an approaching bird; an egret mesmerized by its reflection in a pond, as if it were the master of the universe; or Hanfeng's own folly of repeating the same pattern of hope and heartbreak, hoping despite heartbreak. — Yiyun Li

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

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

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

Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope — Yiyun Li