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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Contributes
Suffers
System
Everybody
Suffering
Something

More quotes by 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.
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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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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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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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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.
Yiyun Li
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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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If I didn't self-censor, I would be in jail, and then I wouldn't be effective at all.
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Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.
Yiyun Li
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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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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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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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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
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I think our eyes are trained to look for what we want to see.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.
Yiyun Li
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Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.
Yiyun Li