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

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Systematic
Species
Except
Revolution
Alive
Another
Way

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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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.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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Almost all of the stories in The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan are told in the first person, yet, depending on the angle and distance of the narrator, they exert different effects. The best are those in which the speaker never poses as an objective outsider. (...) Other stories are damaged by the urge to distance the narrator.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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I think the isolation in China also has to do with people's memories being wiped out, collective memories as well as individual memories, by the fact that the recent history has been constantly rewritten and revised.
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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.
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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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There are people who are willing to work within the system, and people who don't want to work with the system at all.
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Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.
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Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it's the same as calling them a villain.
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In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.
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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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You can write about a country without taking a stand, but you cannot write about a country without noting that there's history, and that there's politics going on. To me, that's the same if you write about America. You don't have to write about politics, but the politics have to be present in the characters.
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Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.
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What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
Yiyun Li