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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.
Yiyun Li
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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Culture
Heroism
Someone
Villain
Way
Heroes
Time
Calling
Hero
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More quotes by Yiyun Li
Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
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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 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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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No one is immune from either taking the wrong action or not taking action at all, but the sense that something is completely out of a person's control is stronger in China.
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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
Yiyun Li