"When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer he..."
- Yiyun Li
"People don't vanish from one's life they come back in disguise. "
"A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time."
"I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement."
"There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind."
"I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to b..."
"Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to whi..."
"The weak-minded choose to hate," she said. "It's the least painful thing to do, isn't it?"
"When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present..."
"Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to f..."