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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Chinese
Justice
Freedom
Care
People

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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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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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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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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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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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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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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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 always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It's really harder if you've already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren't working.
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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li