Yiyun Li > Quotes

“Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“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 here to help us deceive ourselves.”
― 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

“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

“What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?”
― Yiyun Li