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There is a certain amount of politeness here in America, which is probably more than just politeness.

Yiyun Li

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Yiyun Li
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: November 4
Journalist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Peking
Politeness
Amount
Probably
Certain
America

More quotes by Yiyun Li

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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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To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
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It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.
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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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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.
Yiyun Li
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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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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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Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.
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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.
Yiyun Li
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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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I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.
Yiyun Li
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What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?
Yiyun Li
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Everybody contributes something to the system, and everybody suffers from the system.
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.
Yiyun Li
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A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
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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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.
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
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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