Yiyun Li Quotes

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

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

I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone's decision against silence.

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.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

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.

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.

What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance.

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.

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.

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

Much of what one does--to avoid suffering, to seek happiness, to stay healthy--is to keep a safe space for one's private language.

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.

Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

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

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

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.

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

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

Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

Wishing only wounds the heart.

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.

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.

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.

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.

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

Dreams are but prologue to days, epilogue to other days, written by our faltering minds.

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.

SOMETIMES YOU HEAR PEOPLE say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life. A day in a cloister can be as dramatic and fatal as a day on a battlefield.

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.

Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.

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

The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.

Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope

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

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

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

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

Being a mother must be the saddest yet most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

For some people a façade is necessary even with friends

Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not.

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

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.

Parenthood is not some special currency,” Iris said. “Being a parent is not a status thing.” “Surely they’re superior in one way? They’ve done things we’ve been unable to do.” “What, procreation? The turkeys do it. All those dogs and cats do it. Your bees, too. Fuck and breed.

Sometimes I imagine that writing is a survey I carry out, asking everyone I encounter, in reality or in fiction: How much of your life is lived to be known by others? To be understood? How much of your life is lived to know and understand others? But like all surveys the questions are simplifications. How much does one trust others to be known, to be understood; how much does one believe in the possibilities of one person’s knowing and understanding another.

You cannot cut an apple with an apple. I have interrupted that living to write: the story of a faux-prodigy, which is the real story of Fabienne and Agnes, as real as on that day when we were in th graveyard, wanting, and unable, to kill each other; wanting, and unable, to save each other.

Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed.

I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, i thought, would be perfect for that role. You can't be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I've found a perfect enemy in myself.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

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.

Perhaps I was born a material different from my parents. I was born a hard person, harder than most people in my life, so I have only myself to blame when I cannot feel the love of others, my parents among them. Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.

The word immune (from the Latin immunis, in- + munia, services, obligations) is among my favorites in the English language, the possession of immunity—to illnesses, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains—a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life’s necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character - depending on the charity of memory.

Words provided to me-- loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma-- never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one's attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.

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.

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

Reading, however, is a kind of private freedom: out of time, out of place.

Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else's thought

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.

Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.

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

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.

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.

People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I'm reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.

A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.

Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?

small talk is for neighbors and families and maybe, in your case, coworkers. You don’t waste your life having small talk with strangers.

I wished that life could be reset, but reset from when?

People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.

Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.

Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.

There’s a reason for every relationship, that’s what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one’s on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don’t end up randomly as father and daughter, that’s for sure.

He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living—that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead.

A gilmpse into the depth of other people’s misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that the suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another’s suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.

Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

mother: “I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them.

After the second of two hospital stays following a difficult time, I went to a program for those whose lives have fallen apart. Often someone would say—weeping, shaking, or dry eyed—that he or she wished to go back in time and make everything right again. I wished, too, that life could be reset, but reset from when? From each point I could go to an earlier point: warning signs neglected, mistakes aggregated, but it was useless to do so, as I often ended up with the violent wish that I had never been born. I was quiet most of the time, until I was told I was evasive and not making progress. But my pain was my private matter, I thought; if I could understand and articulate my problems I wouldn’t have been there in the first place. Do you want to share anything, I was prompted when I had little to offer. By then I felt my hope had run out. I saw the revolving door admitting new people and letting old people out into the world; similar stories were told with the same remorse and despair; the lectures were on the third repeat. What if I were stuck forever in that basement room? I broke down and could feel a collective sigh: my tears seemed to prove that finally I intended to cooperate. I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

[...] McGahern's voice came in: 'I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything

But the world I—no, not I, Fabienne and I—had given them: Was it real? How much of it was real? We cannot measure a world with a ruler or a scale, and conclude that it is two inches, or two ounces, short of being real. All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal. If I told my parents that in Paris I was posing for the press to photograph, they would say I was making up stories no one would believe. Paris was not real to them. Neither was my fame. The world Fabienne and I made together: it was as real as our nonsense.

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.

A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen's novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly.

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.

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.

He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one's words, Proust's included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You almost an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.

You have to understand, she said, a suicide attempt is selfish. Someone close to me said it was irresponsible; another said manipulative. Yes, I know what you mean, I said to each of them. Understanding cannot be willed into existence. Without understanding one should not talk about feeling. One does not have the capacity to feel another person’s feelings fully - a fact of life, democratic to all, except when someone takes advantage of this fact to form a judgment. One never kills oneself from knowledge or understanding, but always out of feelings.