Yiyun Li famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Football #Distance #Different
Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
-- Yiyun Li

#Heartless #Innocent #Crime
I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'â€”in Chinese or in English.
-- Yiyun Li

#Clouds #Chinese #Fluffy
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
-- Yiyun Li

#Real #Dreamer #Mutual
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

#Letting Go #Distance #Writing
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
-- Yiyun Li

#Struggle #Writing #Someday
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

#Long #Trying #Tragedy
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

#Mother #Opposites #Effort
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

#Memories #Children #Father
What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
-- Yiyun Li

#Way #Revolution #Alive
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

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

#Pay #Faces #Bigger
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

#Strong #Falling In Love #People

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