Quote

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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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Wrong
Sense
Immune
Action
China
Person
Stronger
Something
Completely
Taking
Control
Either

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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 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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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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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
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Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.
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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier.
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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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.
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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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