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I used to think the most important thing for a reporter was to be where the news is and be the first to know. Now I feel a reporter should be able to effect change. Your reporting should move people and motivate people to change the world. Maybe this is too idealistic. Young people who want to be journalists must, first, study and, second, recognize that they should never be the heroes of the story. ..A journalist must be curious, and must be humble. --Zhou Yijun
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Judy Polumbaum (China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism (Asian Voices))
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To blame were two young radicals, a country bumpkin named Mao Tse-tung and a disillusioned intellectual by the name of Zhou En Lai. These two had had the nerve to ask the owners of the mills to install safety devices so that the children and old people who worked long hours would no longer in their weariness lose fingers and even hands in the machinery.
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Katherine Paterson (Stories of My Life)
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Love was a miracle the flesh couldn’t copy.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
“
Clearly, when it comes to love, there is no reasoning it out, you just have to do as your heart compels you,
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Traci Harding (Dreaming of Zhou Gong (Time Keeper Trilogy Book 1))
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Staring at the boat sailing further away from sight, Zhou Zishu deliberately muttered a regard of absolute literary excellence, "f*ck you."
For most of his life he had mingled with the cultured but degenerate side of society; all they did was spouting Confucious this and Confucious that, never did a rude word escape their mouth. He felt incredibly delighted after blurting out that curse, as if years of pent-up frustrations have vanished completely with it.
And to his surprised revelation, cursing turned out to be such an enjoyable thing to do. He was all smiles, whispering once more, "Eat sh*t bastard, got my money and couldn't even do his job right."- Zhou Zishou
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Priest (天涯客 [Tiān Yá Kè] Faraway Wanderers)
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You have so many autumns: so many selves, waiting to be shaken down.
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Zhou Mengdie
“
Death’s shadow only fades little by little as time passes. There will never be more than a thin glass barrier between your present and the wreckage of your past
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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It’s hard to deny life’s little ironies. Wrong place, wrong roles, but united in our commitment to life’s young dream. And yet, our bodies were already tarnished and our minds beyond yelp.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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My daughter Mei-Ying prefers to spend her time riding and practicing Shaolin fighting. No man will marry a woman who can toss him to the ground.
Zhou shakes his head with a father's loving exasperation.
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Sandy Fussell (Shaolin Tiger (Samurai Kids, #3))
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The moment froze. Soldiers passing by stopped and looked, confused. Zhou could taste the moment on his tongue. The wrong move by anyone, from soldier to magician, and the fear would give way to anger, anger to violence and then to death.
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G.R. Matthews (The Blue Mountain (The Forbidden List, #2))
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It is too soon to say.
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Zhou Enlai
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Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly. A butterfly fluttering happily around— was he revealing what he himself meant to be? He knew nothing of Zhou. All at once awakening, there suddenly he was — Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhou having dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhou. Between Zhou and the butterfly there must surely be some distinction. This is known at the transformation of things.
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Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Hackett Classics))
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Zhou fell in behind an administrator carrying a wooden box full of scrolls. His own arms were laden down with scrolls and a scholar's robe covered the dark clothes, the unfortunate previous owner would wake in a few hours with a large bruise and a headache to match. He kept his head down as they approached the guarded door to the keep.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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I’ve always been the kind of person who absolutely loves to tell jokes but can never tell them well. I’m always the only one giggling at the end.
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Wei Hui (Marrying Buddha)
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The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
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Wei Hui (Marrying Buddha)
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BY THE SEA:POEMS OF LOVE, LONGING, AND LUST"
Dedication:
This poetry collection is dedicated to the first poet, the last poet, and all the poets in between.
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Feng Zhou
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At the end of my November 1973 visit, I suggested to Zhou a hotline between Washington and Beijing as part of an agreement on reducing the risks of accidental war.
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Henry Kissinger (On China)
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Zhou,” her voice was just a whisper, “they have not hurt me physically, they have damaged and drained my Qi. I need to rest and recover
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G.R. Matthews (The Blue Mountain (The Forbidden List, #2))
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I am sorry, Zhou,” the fuzzy looking figure said quietly. “War is not what I had thought. There is no honour to be earned or won. Only the blood of innocents. I am sorry.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, “It’s too soon to tell.
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Simon Schama (Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution)
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The Tao Te Ching is an ancient Chinese Text, written in approximately the 6th century BC by Lao Tzu who was a record-keeper at the Zhou Dynasty court.
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Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching Taoism Ultimate Collection)
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The monsters don’t run the gulags and the death camps and the reeducation centers. Regular people do. If they all had the balls to say no, the likes of Halsey, Zhou, or Stalin could never do it all on their own. Could they?
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Karen Traviss (Halo: Glasslands)
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Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean "stop' was considered impossibly counterrevolutionary. It should of course mean "go." And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos. In the end, the old rules reasserted themselves, owing to Zhou Enlai, who managed to convince the Peking Red Guard leaders. But the youngsters found justifications for this: I was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep to the right to show our anti-imperialist spirit. She did not mention America.
As a child I had always shied away from collective activity. Now, at fourteen, I felt even more averse to it. I suppressed this dread because of the constant sense of guilt I had come to feel, through my education, when I was out of step with Mao. I kept telling myself that I must train my thoughts according to the new revolutionary theories and practices. If there was anything I did not understand, I must reform myself and adapt. However, I found myself trying very hard to avoid militant acts such as stopping passersby and cutting their long hair, or narrow trouser legs, or skirts, or breaking their semi-high-heeled shoes. These things had now become signs of bourgeois decadence, according to the Peking Red Guards.
My own hair came to the critical attention of my schoolmates. I had to have it cut to the level of my earlobes. Secretly, though much ashamed of myself for being so "petty bourgeois," I shed tears over losing my long plaits. As a young child, my nurse had a way of doing my hair which made it stand up on top of my head like a willow branch. She called it "fireworks shooting up to the sky." Until the early 1960s I wore my hair in two coils, with rings of little silk flowers wound around them. In the mornings, while I hurried through my breakfast, my grandmother or our maid would be doing my hair with loving hands. Of all the colors for the silk flowers, my favorite was pink.
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Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
“
But this was not enough on its own to generate the kind of terror that Mao wanted. On 18 August, a mammoth rally was held in Tiananmen Square in the center of Peking, with over a million young participants. Lin Biao appeared in public as Mao's deputy and spokesman for the first time. He made a speech calling on the Red Guards to charge out of their schools and 'smash up the four olds' defined as 'old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits."
Following this obscure call, Red Guards all over China took to the streets, giving full vent to their vandalism, ignorance, and fanaticism. They raided people's houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections were destroyed.
Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided.
Palaces, temples, ancient tombs, statues, pagodas, city walls anything 'old' was pillaged. The few things that survived, such as the Forbidden City, did so only because Premier Zhou Enlai sent the army to guard them, and issued specific orders that they should be protected. The Red Guards only pressed on when they were encouraged.
Mao hailed the Red Guards' actions as "Very good indeed!" and ordered the nation to support them.
He encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers, artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were now categorically condemned as 'reactionary bourgeois authorities." With the help of some of these people's colleagues who hated them for various reasons, ranging from fanaticism to envy, the Red Guards began to abuse them. Then there were the old 'class enemies': former landlords and capitalists, people with Kuomintang connections, those condemned in previous political campaigns like the 'rightists' and their children.
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Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
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Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place.
Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.
He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.
Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.
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Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
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Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.
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Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
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When asked if he thought that the French Revolution had been a good thing, Zhou Enlai famously answered that it was too early to tell, which is trite about the Terror, but it would be true about America. It’s too early to tell. If you take a timeline from the first settlements in the 1600s to the present, and compare it with the foundation of modern Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, at the same point in our history the Vikings are attacking Orkney, and Alfred is the first king of bits of what will one day be England.
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A.A. Gill (To America with Love)
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The sky was masked by a column of smoke. New clouds pushed out from the main stack, one over another, higher and higher into the blue. At its upper reach, the cloud began to spread across the sky until it covered the whole of the horizon. Zhou looked up to see it pass overhead. The land grew dark as the cloud covered the sun.
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G.R. Matthews (The Blue Mountain (The Forbidden List, #2))
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Tal vez una escritora simplemente inspira confianza debido a su capacidad intuitiva y a su comprensión.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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Sabia que estaba algo tomada, estar un poco borracha es agradable, todo se puede ver más claro, como cuando la niebla se dispersa.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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I snapped. The anger, I can still feel it now, rose through me like a wave and I drowned in it. I was reborn in it. You know what it is like, Zhou. The world lost its colour, everything turned to black and white. There were shades of grey, but no colour. Even time seemed to slow down, the pain was there and I drew on it. I made it part of me and I threw it at them.
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G.R. Matthews (The Red Plains (The Forbidden List, #3))
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On the surface we're two utterly different types. I'm full of energy and ambition, and see the world as a scented fruit just waiting to be eaten. He is introspective, romantic and for him life is a cake laced with arsenic, every bite poisons him a little more. But our differences only increased our mutual attraction, like the inseparable north and south magnetic poles. We rapidly fell in love.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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Zhou turned away and looked back at the mountain. His first home, the city of Wubei, had been destroyed by fire and he had lost his wife and child. Now, his second home was gone. All of his security, his friends, his loved ones, the roof over his head, it was all gone. A wave of loneliness swept through him. Tears swelled in his eyes and flowed down his face, leaving tracks in the dust covering his skin.
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G.R. Matthews (The Blue Mountain (The Forbidden List, #2))
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Kundera dijo que en el siglo XXI todos serán escritores, con sólo tomar la pluma y escribir lo que se piensa. El deseo de compartir sus sentimientos es una necesidad espiritual de todos los seres humanos.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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Unity succeeds division and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. This is the way with things in the world. At the end of the Zhou Dynasty* the empire was divided into seven competing principalities, warring against one another till finally they were united by Qin.† When Qin had fulfilled its destiny, there arose Chu‡ and Han§ to contend for the reign, and ultimately it was Han that united the country.
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Luo Guanzhong (The Three Kingdoms, Volume 1: The Sacred Oath (The Three Kingdoms, #1 of 3) (Chapter 1-35))
“
Zhou,” Biyu said, when Sabaa paused, “before the Jade Emperor, humans were just like the beasts in the field. We ate, lived and reproduced, but we were going nowhere. The universe is order in all its perfection, stagnant and unchanging. The wars set us free. Free to change, to learn, to adapt, to become more than we were. To do that, we sacrificed order for a measure of chaos, of challenge. It let some people, men and women, do evil, but even that inspired many more to do good. Medicines, writing, music, architecture, all the accomplishments of your Empire came at a high price, but it was worth paying. Tonight we reaffirm that fact. Without the power we grant the Jade Emperor from the realms we represent, we would lose all that we have gained. The universe would reassert its control. Over the years, order would take charge once more and progress would end. Given time, our race would slide back into the beasts we were once. It is something we could not survive.
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G.R. Matthews (The Red Plains (The Forbidden List, #3))
“
once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope they would repeat Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s much-quoted answer to Richard Nixon’s question ‘What is the impact of the French Revolution?’, to which the prime minister replied ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ Sadly this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of ‘what you call human rights’ in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, ‘Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?
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Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
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For years, Zhou had been a follower of Mao Zedong, careful never to utter a word of opposition. In this sense, Zhou had assisted in the creation of the very totalitarian system of which he became the victim. Yet in terms of historical legacy, it is Zhou Enlai who has emerged the victor over Mao. Zhou’s death not only struck the death knell of the Cultural Revolution, but also announced the bankruptcy of the Communist myth. If someone so devoted and loyal as Zhou ended up suffering such pathetic treatment at the hands of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, how could anyone trust in the aims of the revolution?
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Gao Wenqian (Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary)
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Mao asks Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, “How do you get a cat to bite a hot pepper?” Zhou says, “You hold him down, pry his jaws open, and shove the pepper into his mouth.” Mao says, “No, that’s force. We want the cat to bite the pepper of his own free will.” Deng says, “You take the pepper, wrap it in a delicious piece of fish, and, before he knows it, the cat has bitten the pepper.” Mao says, “No, that’s trickery. We want the cat to know he’s biting the pepper.” Zhou and Deng say, “We give up. How do you make a cat bite a hot pepper?” “It’s easy,” Mao says. “Stick the pepper up the cat’s ass. He’ll be glad to bite it.
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P.J. O'Rourke (Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics)
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It bounded from the line of trees directly ahead. This was his first real sight of the spirit and the breath stuck in his throat. Its black fur rippled as muscles bunched, flexed and powered the sleek animal towards him. Front legs reached forward, claws extended to dig into the soft ground as its body compressed. Back arching upwards as the rear legs caught up with the front and gathered their strength, propelling the cat forward again. The panther ate up the ground between the forest and Zhou. As it closed, he could see the yellow iris surrounding the deep, black, circular pupil. Either side of its snout, whiskers sprouted, sensing the movement of air, and its mouth parted to reveal two, long, sharp canine teeth rising from its bottom jaw.
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G.R. Matthews (The Blue Mountain (The Forbidden List, #2))
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She started to head out, but she passed her room. It was the same as she'd left it: a pile of cushions by her bed for Little Brother to sleep on, a stack of poetry and famous literature on her desk that she was supposed to study to become a "model bride," and the lavender shawl and silk robes she'd worn the day before she left home. The jade comb Mulan had left in exchange for the conscription notice caught her eye; it now rested in front of her mirror.
Mulan's gaze lingered on the comb, on its green teeth and the pearl-colored flower nestled on its shoulder. She wanted to hold it, to put it in her hair and show her family- to show everyone- she was worthy. After all, her surname, Fa, meant flower. She needed to show them that she had bloomed to be worthy of her family name.
But no one was here, and she didn't want to face her reflection. Who knew what it would show, especially in Diyu?
She isn't a boy, her mother had told her father once. She shouldn't be riding horses and letting her hair loose. The neighbors will talk. She won't find a good husband-
Let her, Fa Zhou had consoled his wife. When she leaves this household as a bride, she'll no longer be able to do these things.
Mulan hadn't understood what he meant then. She hadn't understood the significance of what it meant for her to be the only girl in the village who skipped learning ribbon dances to ride Khan through the village rice fields, who chased after chickens and helped herd the cows instead of learning the zither or practicing her painting, who was allowed to have opinions- at all.
She'd taken the freedom of her childhood for granted.
When she turned fourteen, everything changed.
I know this will be a hard change to make, Fa Li had told her, but it's for your own good. Men want a girl who is quiet and demure, polite and poised- not someone who speaks out of turn and runs wild about the garden. A girl who can't make a good match won't bring honor to the family. And worse yet, she'll have nothing: not respect, or money of her own, or a home. She'd touched Mulan's cheek with a resigned sigh. I don't want that fate for you, Mulan.
Every morning for a year, her mother tied a rod of bamboo to Mulan's spine to remind her to stand straight, stuffed her mouth with persimmon seeds to remind her to speak softly, and helped Mulan practice wearing heeled shoes by tying ribbons to her feet and guiding her along the garden.
Oh, how she'd wanted to please her mother, and especially her father. She hadn't wanted to let them down. But maybe she hadn't tried enough. For despite Fa Li's careful preparation, she had failed the Matchmaker's exam. The look of hopefulness on her father's face that day- the thought that she'd disappointed him still haunted her.
Then fate had taken its turn, and Mulan had thrown everything away to become a soldier. To learn how to punch and kick and hold a sword and shield, to shoot arrows and run and yell. To save her country, and bring honor home to her family.
How much she had wanted them to be proud of her.
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Elizabeth Lim (Reflection)
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La vida es como una enfermedad crónica y encontrar algo interesante qué hacer es una especie de alivio a largo plazo.
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Wei Hui
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I’m in Suzhou, Zhou Lingtong said, angling his head so he could wipe away his tears and see the road sign clearly. I’m in Changrui Lane, Suzhou. If you walk north past two telephone poles you’ll find me in the dustbin.
["Two Lives", in Pathlight: New Chinese Writing (Summer 2013)]
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A Yi
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We can say that go is about three things: freedom, space and speed. These are basic human values and their essential role in go is part of the reason the game has attracted millions of players for thousands of years.
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Yuan Zhou (How to Not Play Go)
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In go, the players have great freedom of action, seek to obtain enough room, and try to do so as efficiently as possible. Weaker players give up their freedom in go very easily, by not making thoughtful use of it. They don't calculate how much space they are controlling, and they pay little attention to the efficiency of their moves.
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Yuan Zhou (How to Not Play Go)
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Of course, to the Iranians, with a history spanning thousands of years, the events of 1953 were like yesterday, and the support the United States gave to the Shah and the SAVAK up until the bitter end in 1979 were even fresher wounds. This calls to mind the story about Chinese premier Zhou Enlai being asked by Richard Nixon in 1972 about the significance of the 1789 French Revolution, whereupon Enlai, also from a country with an ancient history, quipped, “too early to say.” In truth, the well-documented amnesia that Americans have about historic events is selective, with Americans usually able to remember the tragedies they have suffered and the crimes committed against them, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Of course, in all fairness, Americans are kept in the dark about the less savory episodes in our collective history by both our schools and our press. At the same time, it seems to me that in addition to a lack of knowledge is a lack of empathy for others’ suffering, as well as the complete refusal to accept the truth about the suffering our nation has inflicted on others even when we are told about it.
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Dan Kovalik (The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Iran)
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But reason didn't play a big part in the guilt I'd felt, deep in my heart, since the moment I'd seen his dead face beneath its shroud of snow. Once I'd faced it, I couldn't shake the shame. And somehow, the blame and repining sorrow changed me. I felt the vengeful stone fall from the hating hand that had wanted to throw it. I felt light, as if light itself filled me and lifted me up. And I felt free - free enough to pity Madame Zhou, and even to forgive her.
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Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
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A ruler who failed to manage China’s waters didn’t just risk social decay. He exposed himself to the charge that heaven itself had lost confidence in his capacity to rule. This idea is attributed to the Duke of Zhou,
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Philip Ball (The Water Kingdom)
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TheShanghaiMuseum“Zhouyi周易”manuscript
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Haeree Park (The Writing System of Scribe Zhou: Evidence from Late Pre-imperial Chinese Manuscripts and Inscriptions (5th-3rd Centuries BCE) (Studies in Manuscript Cultures Book 4))
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But somehow, in some way, for some reason, the love had died in me, and I suddenly realised it, and was suddenly sure. It wasn’t completely over, my feeling for Karla. It never is completely over. But there was nothing of the jealousy I once would’ve felt for the stranger Ranjit. There was no rage against him, and no feeling of hurt inspired by her. I felt numbed and empty sitting there, as if the war, and the loss of Khaderbhai and Khaled, and the face-off with Madame Zhou and her twins had poured anaesthetic into my heart.
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Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
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9)”《赞》曰:“风行水上,涣为文章;当其风止,与水相忘。剪缀帖括,藻粉铺张。江左以还,极于陈梁。千载有公,继韩欧阳。余岂异趋,久而始伤。
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周振甫 (Shu Tan Yi Lu Reading ( Zhou Zhenfu .9787511715555 Central Compilation and Translation Press )(Chinese Edition))
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长吉《高轩过》篇有“笔补造化天无功”一语,此不特长吉精神心眼之所在,而于道术之大原,艺事之极本,亦一言道著矣。夫天理流行,天工造化,无所谓道术学艺也。学与术者,人事之法天,人定之胜天,人心之通天者也。《书·皋陶谟》曰:“天工,人其代之。”《法言·问道》篇曰:“或问雕刻众形,非天欤。曰:‘以其不雕刻也。’”百凡道艺之发生,皆天与人之凑合耳。顾天一而已,纯乎自然,艺由人为,乃生分别。(
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周振甫 (Shu Tan Yi Lu Reading ( Zhou Zhenfu .9787511715555 Central Compilation and Translation Press )(Chinese Edition))
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I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
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Zhuang Zhou
“
The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.
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Robert N. Bellah (Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age)
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Quelle en est la cause ? La voici : dans les temps modernes et dans l'antiquité, il n'y avait plus de rois depuis longtemps; la maison des Tcheou (Zhou n.n.) s'était affaiblie; quand les cinq hégémons eurent cessé d'être, ses ordres n'eurent plus d'autorité dans l'empire; c'est pourquoi les seigneurs gouvernèrent par la violence ; les forts tyrannisèrent les faibles; la majorité opprima la minorité; les armes et les cuirasses ne furent point déposées; les hommes de valeur et le peuple furent épuisés. Or, quand Ts'in (Qin n.n.) se tourna du côté du sud et régna sur l'empire, il y eut dès lors en haut un Fils du Ciel ; aussitôt la multitude innombrable du peuple espéra obtenir la paix conforme à sa nature et à sa destinée ; il n’y eut per- sonne qui ne se portât vers lui de tout son cœur et qui ne regardât en haut avec respect. Dans ces circonstances, c’était là que se trouvait le principe du prestige protecteur, de la gloire assurée, du péril conjuré.
Le roi de Ts’in (Qin n.n.) nourrissait des sentiments avides et bas; il appliquait les connaissances qui sortaient de son propre esprit; il ne donnait pas sa confiance aux ministres éprouvés et ne contractait pas des liens étroits avec les gens de valeur et le peuple ; il abandonna la ligne de conduite suivie par les rois et établit son pou- voir autocratique; il interdit les écrits et les livres et rendit impitoyables les châtiments et les lois ; il mit au premier rang la tromperie et la violence, et au dernier rang la bonté et la justice; il fit de la tyrannie le fonde- ment de l'empire. Or, si celui qui conquiert et annexe met en avant la tromperie et la violence, d’autre part, celui qui pacifie et affermit tient en estime la douceur et l’équité ; cela signifie que les méthodes ne sont pas les mêmes pour prendre et pour conserver.
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Sima Qian (Mémoires historiques - Deuxième Section (French Edition))
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Rationality binds people in reality, but imagination frees us to transcend worlds.
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Zhou Daxin (Fields of Joy)
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One Politburo meeting had an important topic to discuss, but before the meeting began, Jiang Qing raised a fuss, saying, 'Premier, you need to solve a serious problem for me, otherwise there will be real trouble!' Zhou Enlai asked, 'Comrade Jiang Qing, what is this serious problem?' Jiang Qing said, 'The toilet im my quarters is so cold that I can't use it in chilly weather - I'll catch the flu the moment I sit on it, and once I catch the flu, I can't go to see Chairman Mao for fear he'll catch it. Isn't this a serious matter?' Zhou Enlai said, 'How shall we deal with this? Shall I send someone to have a look at it after the meeting?' Jiang Qing found this unacceptable, saying, 'Premier, you lack class sentiment toward me; the class enemies are just waiting for me to die as soon as possible!' Zhou Enlai had no choice but to cancel the meeting and take us all over to Jiang Qing's quarters. Zhou Enlai looked at Jiang Qing's toilet and rubbed his chin thoughtfully without coming up with a solution. Finally he said, 'Comrade Jiang Qing, how about this: We don't have the technology to heat this toilet, but we could wrap the seat with insulating material, and also pad it with soft cloth, and that should solve the problem temporarily.' Jiang Qing agreed to this, and Zhou Enlai immediately told the Central Committee Secretariat to send someone over to deal with it.
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Yang Jisheng (The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution)
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At the meeting, Lu Dingyi made self-criticism, admitting that it seemed unbelievable that he could have lived with Yan Weibing for twenty-five years without knowing about her letters, but insisting on his innocence. 'Yan Weibing is now at the Ministry of Public Security, so please ask her. If I knew anything about her letters before reading the Ministry of Public Security files, please treat me like a chief conspirator and accomplice of counterrevolution and punish me more harshly.' In reply to Lin Biao's grilling, Lu said: 'isn't it quite common for husbands not to know what their wives are up to?' Lin Biao said: 'I'm itching to shoot you right here and now!' He went on, 'I've always had a liking for some intellectuals, and I've been especially fond of you, Lu Dingyi. So why do you engage in this kind of mischief? What's your intention?' When Lu Dingyi said he really didn't know about the letters, Lin Biao smacked the table and said, 'How can you not know when you're in bed fucking every day?' The denunciation turned farcical as Zhou Enlai hurled a a tea mug in Lu Dingyi's direction, and Yang Chengwu shook his fist under Lu's face and said, 'This is the dictatorship of the proletariat!
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Yang Jisheng (The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution)
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Not being fish, how can we prize their contentment? /Alas, we can only take an ideal and turn it into a simulacrum [of happiness] / To probe the subtleties of the mundane / We must describe the ineffable
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Dongqing Zhou
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Where are you, Shen Mo?” “Did you go with Zhou Yang?” “Come back.” “Shen Mo, don’t go.” “Stay here.” “... Stay by my side.
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Kun Yi Wei Lou (The Missing Piece)
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He remembered how the scar-faced man had stepped on his fingers one by one, sneering while telling him that Zhou Yang would never show up. Zhou Yang was abroad with his childhood sweetheart. No matter how many phone calls Shen Mo made, no one answered.
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Kun Yi Wei Lou (The Missing Piece)
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Shen Mo stared at Zhou Yang for a few moments. He couldn’t help but soften his tone. “If two people truly loved each other, no trick could drive them apart.” If two people broke up, it must be because they didn’t love each other deeply enough.
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Kun Yi Wei Lou (The Missing Piece)
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Shen Mo shook his right hand, realizing for the first time how good it felt to hit someone. Perhaps he should have hit Zhou Yang a long time ago.
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Kun Yi Wei Lou (The Missing Piece)
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I am reminded of the summers of my childhood, chasing rabbits through the tall grass, later soaking myself in ocean water. The water always left a brine that caked my arms and legs. No matter how hard my mother scrubbed, I do not think the salt ever truly came off. There may still be some left in the crooks of my elbows and knees now. Be careful with me, I want to tell the man who has dragged me to the end of the line were Nam, Lum, Zhou and Nelson kneel. I am carrying an ocean.
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Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Four Treasures of the Sky)
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The new Empress was now to be referred to as the Chakravartin Empress Wu of the Zhou Dynasty, Divine Sovereign of the Golden Wheel of the Law. To this, in 695, she officially added a further title: the Peerless Maitreya. The former Fifth Concubine was now to be publicly revered as both Universal Sovereign and Future Buddha.57
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William Dalrymple (The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World)
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33. Du T, Zhou G, Roizman B. HSV-1 gene expression from reactivated ganglia is disordered and concurrent with suppression of latency-associated transcript and miRNAs. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2011;108:18820–18824. 34. Dunowska M, Letchworth GJ, Collins JK, et al.
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David M. Knipe (Fields Virology)
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The tingle raced up his arm and met the duke’s invasion in Zhou’s head. His whole body convulsed, heels drummed against the stone, arms muscles locked rigid, and Zhou felt time stop between one heartbeat and the next. Everything was silent and still.
The smell of damp earth, the bracing winter wind, the spring sun upon skin, the dry heat of summer, all exploded in Zhou’s mind. New life flooded his limbs and the roots of purpose dug down through his thoughts, anchoring him and making him whole again. Control returned to him.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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I see nothing,” Zhou said.
“Look again, past the horizon. Now tell me again, what do you see?” the emperor said.
“I see,” the emperor saw wrinkles appear around Zhou’s eyes, “a red flame.”
“Good,” said the emperor. “Though good is not what I would term the flame of itself. Haung, the refugees who have arrived at the city gates are only the first of flood heading our way. There is something to the north, something so horrible whole nations are fleeing from it.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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She ignored the boy’s protest and kept walking. He shouldn’t be watching street fights at his age, impressionable as he was. Uncle and Auntie Yin had enough to complain about without her being a bad influence on her little cousin. The swordsman caught up with her easily, keeping an arm’s length between them while they walked together down the dusty street. There was none of the posturing and swagger she’d come to expect from Zhou’s lackeys. From outward appearances, they could have been joining one another for an afternoon stroll. “Those are exquisite.” He was talking about the swords. Twin blades; short, light and quick. Many called them butterfly swords, but there was nothing delicate about them. They were ideal weapons for a woman fighting a larger opponent. Heaven forbid he’d look at her with the same interest. She sniffed, but a thread of doubt worked loose inside her. He was the first to be interested in her skill rather than the novelty of this odd girl who dared to challenge men. “You don’t seem like one of Zhou’s thugs,” she said.
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Jeannie Lin (The Taming of Mei Lin (Tang Dynasty, #.5))
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In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu’s entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out.
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Richard Bernstein (China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice)
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As he closed in on the mess tent, he could hear the first voices of the morning and gave a sigh of relief. The mess tent flap was closed, and he fancied he could hear the sounds of cooking, the clinking and clanking of metal, hisses of steam, from inside. His belly rolled again at the thought of food but he steeled himself, reached out a hand, lifted the flap, and stepped inside.
The inside was empty of life but it was full of death. Bodies of Wubei men lay where they had collapsed dotted all around the interior. The smell of loosened bowels and vomit violated the sanctity of Zhou’s nose causing him to heave and retch. When he had regained control he forced himself to examine the scene, to make sense of it. There was food still on the table and open barrels of wine around the place but no sign of blood or struggle.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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Zhou watched the fake Chung’s face vanish to be replaced by another's.
“Look, Hsin,” Zhou snarled, “this is your fault.”
“No.” Hsin’s voice was a desperate whisper.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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It is my watch, I must go,” Zhou said, a lump of fear and sadness in his throat. His hand cupped his wife's soft cheek. “Stay indoors and bolt the doors. I will be back later.”
This was the third day since the cattle had shown up and the siege had begun. The second time he had said goodbye to the people he loved most. He picked up his boy and, being careful of the metal plates on his armour, squeezed him tightly.
“Daddy, brave,” said his son.
“Yes, Daddy brave.” He looked over the boy’s head at his wife, “Look after Mummy for me while I am out. I’ll see you later. I love you, both of you.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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Zhou followed and bringing his horse to a halt, attempted to swing his leg over the cantle. It refused to move. Trying again, his muscles complained at the demands. He leaned to the left, hoping his weight would drag his foot clear of the stirrup, which it did. His supporting leg decided it was unwilling to take the burden of his whole body and gave way. Turning at the last moment, he landed on his back. Breath exploded from his lungs and his head hit the thankfully, cushioning grass with enough force to make red and orange blotches dance in his eyes. Despite the impact, the ground felt a great deal more comfortable than being on the horse and he was tempted to close his eyes and sleep.
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G.R. Matthews (The Red Plains (The Forbidden List, #3))
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Later he understood Zhou to be “a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century,” but he “had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.
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Richard Bernstein (China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice)
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Old Zhou Jin began singing a hymn Quan had heard and reluctantly sung many times since childhood: “One day I’ll die for the Lord.
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Randy Alcorn (Safely Home)
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The animal came out of the undergrowth with incredible speed. Zhou could see the blue glow surrounding it and could clearly make out the fangs that were rushing towards him. He had been expecting it. He had felt the spirit animal close by for some time but despite searching carefully had not seen it camouflaged by the undergrowth.
Zhou turned to face the animal’s leap and opened his arms to embrace it.
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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Hold them back,” Zhou shouted as he took a fierce grip on his staff, “Hold them back.”
Wubei troops rushed past him and into the battle.
“For your lives, for your families, for Wubei!
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G.R. Matthews (The Stone Road (The Forbidden List, #1))
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Should give myself a break, read books travel by foot clam down deep breath and go on.But it's can'tbe ture.After all,I am living in the realworld
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Hsing zhou
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Another piece of the puzzle comes from author Peter Hessler’s interview with Zhou Youguang (known as ‘The Father of Pinyin’), in which Zhou suggests that it was a remark made by Stalin to Mao during a visit to the Soviet Union that caused the change of focus.
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David Moser (A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: China Penguin Special)
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People deceive themselves, or deceive each other, that is the origin of comedy.
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Hsing zhou
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He was not a good salesman, especially if selling himself. He didn’t believe in boasting, and didn’t like listening to others do it, either. He wanted to be recognized for his actions, not his words. “I don’t know how to ask people to sponsor me,” Zhou said. “It feels just like begging people for money. I can’t do that.
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Dan Washburn (Forbidden Game: Golf and the Chinese Dream)
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When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, “It’s too early to tell.
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Graham E. Fuller (A World Without Islam)
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This precocious advance may have had a lot to do with the nature of the plain between the Yangtze and Yellow rivers. The territory is well suited both for agriculture, which leads to population growth, and for warfare, the two principal propellants of state formation. A relentless process of consolidation forced tribal systems to yield to states. In 2000 BC, a large number of political entities—traditionally put at 10,000—existed in the Yellow River valley. By the time of the Shang dynasty in 1500 BC, these had dwindled to some 3,000 tribal chiefdoms. The Eastern Zhou dynasty began in 771 BC with 1,800 chiefdoms and ended with 14 entities that were much closer to states. During the ensuing Warring States period, which lasted from around 475 BC to 221 BC, the 7 remaining states were reduced to 1. China
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Nicholas Wade (A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History)
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Sentada enfrente de mis borradores, de repente me invadió el pánico como cuando un mago descubre que acaba de perder sus poderes por completo. Ahora simplemente no podía penetrar en el mundo distante de las letras, a mi alrededor ocurrían cambios incesantemente, como las pequeñas ondas del agua. Siempre había pensado en un triunfo repentino, como Alí Baba que sólo con leer un conjuro abrió la puerta de la cueva del tesoro, como Bill Gates que en una noche se convirtió en archimillonario, como Gong Li que a mi edad ya había subyugado a decenas de millones de hombres blancos con su magnífica belleza sin hablar una sola palabra de inglés.
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Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
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El Zhuangzi es el segundo texto fundamental del Taoísmo, atribuido a Zhuang Zhou (también conocido como Chuang-Tzu), un filósofo que vivió aproximadamente en el siglo IV a.C. A diferencia del Tao Te Ching, el Zhuangzi es más extenso y narrativo, compuesto por una serie de capítulos que incluyen fábulas, diálogos y anécdotas. El Zhuangzi se divide tradicionalmente en tres partes: Capítulos Internos: Los primeros siete capítulos que contienen las enseñanzas más centrales y filosóficas del texto. Capítulos Externos: Del capítulo 8 al 22, que expanden y desarrollan los temas introducidos en los capítulos internos. Capítulos Misceláneos: Del capítulo 23 al 33, que incluyen una variedad de historias y reflexiones adicionales. Principales Temas: Relatividad y Perspectiva: Zhuangzi destaca la naturaleza relativa de la verdad y la percepción, sugiriendo que todas las cosas son subjetivas y cambiantes. Libertad Espiritual: Promueve la liberación de las convenciones sociales y las preocupaciones mundanas para alcanzar una auténtica libertad del espíritu. Naturaleza y Espontaneidad: Alienta a vivir de acuerdo con la naturaleza y a actuar de manera espontánea, siguiendo el curso natural de las cosas. El Zhuangzi es conocido por sus vívidas fábulas y parábolas, que utilizan personajes imaginarios y situaciones fantásticas para ilustrar sus puntos filosóficos. Una de las historias más famosas es la del "sueño de la mariposa", donde Zhuangzi sueña que es una mariposa y, al despertar, no sabe si es un hombre que soñó ser una mariposa o una mariposa que sueña ser un hombre. Esta historia resalta la ambigüedad de la realidad y la percepción. Ambos textos, el Tao Te Ching y el Zhuangzi, han tenido una profunda influencia no solo en la filosofía y la religión china, sino también en la literatura, el arte y la cultura global. Sus enseñanzas sobre la armonía con la naturaleza, la importancia de la humildad y la simplicidad, y la búsqueda de la libertad espiritual continúan siendo importantes en la actualidad, ofreciendo una guía atemporal para quienes buscan una vida equilibrada y significativa.
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María Molina Molina (Taoísmo: Sabiduría Oriental para una Vida Equilibrada. (Spanish Edition))
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One who mutilates benevolence should be called a ‘mutilator.’ One who mutilates righteousness should be called a ‘crippler.’ A crippler and mutilator is called a mere ‘fellow.’ I have indeed heard of the execution of this one fellow Zhou, but I have not heard of it as the assassination of one’s ruler.
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Mencius (Mencius)
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It wasn't a joke when I said I like you. You said that the person I'm in love with is very lucky to be loved by me. It is a pity that you will never know that luck has always belonged to you… Zhou Shu Yi, I like you.
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Lin Pei Yu, We Best Love: No. 1 For You
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What's truly invaluable is that which is regained after being lost. It's the things we don't cherish until they're gone, whose importance
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Maoyi Zhou (Supreme Martial Arts: Divine Path of Heaven and Earth 2 (Legend of the Divine Martial Book 28))
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remember what Cindy said about starting middle school and making a statement. We both made statements all right, just very different ones.
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Jack Cheng (The Many Masks of Andy Zhou)
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K.G. Andersen et al., “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Nature Medicine 2020; 26: 450–455; P. Zhou et al, “A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated with a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin,” Nature 2020; 579: 270–273.
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Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
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rebels from the Foreign Ministry, who wanted to hold a discussion about launching a struggle meeting of their own
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Gao Wenqian (Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary)
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Xi has publicly scolded Party functionaries who don’t give proper attention to the law. “We will spread the rule of law throughout the country,” he once announced. For the CCP, though, the rule of law means something completely different from what it means to most citizens of Western democracies. The Chinese word for rule of law is fa zhi, and is made up of the words fa (law) and zhi (rule). China-watchers spent many years puzzling over where the Party might take this idea. Would they tread a slow path toward the “rule of law” in our sense? Or was the destination to be “rule by law”—with laws mere tools in the service of power? The riddle has long since been solved. Xi Jinping himself has compared the role of laws to the “handle of a knife in the hand of the Party.” In summer 2015 the lawyer Zhou Shifeng, head of the above-mentioned Fengrui practice, explained to me his interpretation of the Party’s “rule of law”: “What they mean by that is: ‘I will take my laws and rule you with them.’” Less than four weeks after our conversation, Zhou was in prison. Shortly afterward he made a forced confession on state television, where he was shamed as the mastermind of a “criminal gang”; and a year later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “subversion.
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Kai Strittmatter (We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State)
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Da Bei Zhou compassion mantra and Tao Healing Hands teachings brought my search to oneness with the Tao to a fruitful end.
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Ricardo B Serrano
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Shanghai is a city obsessed with pleasure.
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Zhou Weihui (Shanghai Baby)
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Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi approved an infantile demand by the Red Guards that traffic police replace their batons with Quotations of Chairman Mao, claiming that only Mao Zedong Thought could point people in the correct direction. Zhou Enlai managed to talk the Red Guards out of their demand to change traffic lights because red was the symbol of the revolution and should not be the color for obstructing progress. He and the commander of the Beijing Military Region, Zheng Weisan, were also able to convince the Red Guards to abandon their demand to march from west to east (i.e. away from capitalism) when being reviewed by Mao at Tiananmen Square, pointing out that reversing the direction would require Red Guards to salute Mao with their left hands and force Mao to look right rather than left from the gate tower.
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Yang Jisheng (The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution)
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To me, this sounds like a real-life version of a story—the title of which is often translated as “The Useless Tree”—from the Zhuangzi, a collection of writings attributed Zhuang Zhou, a fourth-century Chinese philosopher. The story is about a carpenter who sees a tree (in one version, a serrate oak, a similar-looking relative to our coast live oak) of impressive size and age. But the carpenter passes it right by, declaring it a “worthless tree” that has only gotten to be this old because its gnarled branches would not be good for timber. Soon afterward, the tree appears to him in a dream and asks, “Are you comparing me with those useful trees?” The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: “This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?” The tree balks at the distinction between usefulness and worth, made by a man who only sees trees as potential timber: “What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”5 It’s easy for me to imagine these words being spoken by Old Survivor to the nineteenth-century loggers who casually passed it over, less than a century before we began realizing what we’d lost.
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Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
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It’s important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bioregional awareness because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all coproduce one another. It’s also important because of the parallels between what the economy does to an ecological system and what the attention economy does to our attention. In both cases, there’s a tendency toward an aggressive monoculture, where those components that are seen as “not useful” and which cannot be appropriated (by loggers or by Facebook) are the first to go. Because it proceeds from a false understanding of life as atomized and optimizable, this view of usefulness fails to recognize the ecosystem as a living whole that in fact needs all of its parts to function. Just as practices like logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose “production” slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. As it extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention. Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.
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Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
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Death is the expression of exhaustion, a solution arrived at rationally once one has known the deepest depths of tiredness. I’ve thought about it for a long time, perhaps all my life, and having thought it through, I’m not ashamed of dying. A person like me can’t go on constantly polluting himself, annihilating his soul.
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Wei Hui
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The Zhou Dynasty was the longest-lived in Chinese history, spanning eight hundred years. During the Zhou period, the importance of bronze was increased, causing this era to be considered the height of the Bronze Age in China. The Zhou were the first to give a name to the Mandate of Heaven, and in order to legitimize their own position, retroactively applied the term to the Xia and Shang. Under the Zhou, China entered a period of feudalism, which is a system of power and wealth based on land ownership. This period is analogous to the Middle Ages in Europe when a similar system was in use. It was during the Zhou Dynasty that some of China’s most influential thinkers lived, including Confucius, Lao tzu, and Sun tzu. The Zhou also standardized written language into a shape similar to its modern form. In addition, the Zhou began using reservoirs as a source of crop irrigation, meaning that farming could be moved inland from flowing water sources, helping to alleviate the problem of flooding. Historians consider the Zhou Dynasty to be the peak of classical Chinese civilization, thanks to contributions in so many fields.
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Henry Freeman (The History of China in 50 Events (History by Country Timeline #2))