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

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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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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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
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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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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
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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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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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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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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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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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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
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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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective 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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