quotes by Yiyun Li

"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 (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories)

"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."
— Yiyun Li (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories)