Quote

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Firsts
Decaying
First
Dragged
Trying
Nuisance
Long
Strikes
Tragedy
Turned
Death
Annihilating
Better
Completes

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Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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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.
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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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