Han Suyin Quotes

There is nothing stronger in this world than gentleness.

Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

... all humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness. And love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other." - The Mountain is Young

One should never condemn what one cannot understand.

Whatever has happened, there is always that magic winter haunting and hurting me with its marvelous echoes. The shortest days of the year, when nothing had begun and nothing had ended, all the roads of life were alive, and time beat round me like a heart.

I wouldn’t know where pure emotion, a crush as you say, stops and sex begins. Does anyone know? When does a feeling become a sin? When the body performs what is already formed in the mind? Tell me that, Red?

You sap our self-confidence until we exist merely to court your approval (...) You keep us perpetually off balance, unpleasantly aware of our inferiority, and that's the whole secret of your skill and power.

She alone would do a mad and wonderful thing like that, ringing me up. No one else ever did things like that for me. I always had had to do the ringing up and the asking, and going to people’s rooms, always I was the one to ask for love.

Unni will come, if not today, then tomorrow. Today is nearly gone, but other todays stir fecund in the word tomorrow, many other todays when this one has lapsed from existence. And because I think of Unni, invoking his name in this for ever recurrent today, already he is here for me." - The Mountain is Young

And what do we do to fit our English-speaking Chinese, our docile and happy, our truly loyal servants, for the Asia of the future? We teach them English history: Henry the VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria, English geography, three-quarters of the book the British Isles, one quarter the rest of the world. literature, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and The Mill on the Floss, all in Basic, as they aren't to know the complexities of our tongue. We cut them from their own learning, their traditions; if that were cutting them off merely from the past, it wouldn't matter, but also and more dangerously, it cuts them from the present, and perhaps the future of Asia. With these happy eunuchs who are bound to us by their knowledge of English we run this country well as our colonial preserve. But we cannot pretend to think we can leave it to them to run it for themselves. All the revolutionaries in India were people who went back to their own literature and language. We'll see the same phenomenon here.

Mao Tsetung's grasp of the future, his vision of man's true role on earth, has given him a place as a world figure. His creative genius has come from his constant return to the people, resisting all attempts to elevate himself above them. Much has been said about the "personality cult"; I have seen true, genuine love and admiration from the ordinary people of China for Mao Tsetung. The personality cult evolved round him by city bureaucrats he has done his best to put down, withdrawing himself as a person, giving to the people all homage for the Revolution. It is in this spirit, not elevating Mao as a genius, but showing him as a man, in a constant search for truth, for reality, that this book has been written.

There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.

But it was a shortcoming so slight, so easily laid by compared with all the rest: the emotional peace, apart from the near but not altogether achieved physical fulfillment; the security and the trust; the sense of caring and being cared for. Tenderness, which made our inadequate loving better than anything we had had so far, made us shrink from desiring more, from desiring too much. These would only be explorations in the physical realms of satisfaction disgust and satiety would follow, and then we would have doomed ourselves. Therefore, we thought we had enough.

And that's what Mahudin calls our thought control...an induced hypnosis of inferiority, destroying confidence and initiative, prolonging the period of tutelage which we would like to go on forever...

Hearsay was far more important than knowledge[...]for it is easier to appear knowledgeable than to become so.

But we...are more bound by custom than by law, and old customs die hard

Politics don‘t stop love. He will say to her: "You are as beautiful as our new hydro-electric plant." And she will reply: "Comrade, how progressive of you.