"He's such a strapping man, yet he lost his mind so easily."

"Some men would not shoot their draft animals, but afraid other might kill them for meat, they set them free. Some of the horses and mules wouldn't go away and followed their former keeps to this shore."

"A large mole kept moving near the edge of Chaolin's left eye as he spoke."

"We were all like hungry ghosts, fearful but unable to stop wandering around."

"I hadn't come across a book for half a year. the deprivation had whetted my appetite."

"On the roadside, grass sprouted here and there like tiny scissor blades."

"For me, this is too simple. I believer there must be a power much larger than an individual, like a multiplier. If you tap that power, you can multiply yourself. You can become one hundred or one thousand, depending on what the multiplier is."

"'Why?' Asked Colonel Choi, whose small eyes turned triangular."

"One of them managed to sit up; he seemed to have suffered a concussion -- his eyes, ears, and nose were bleeding. Wordlessly he was flailing his arms in every direction as though blind."

"These men had no gods to worship, so they could only project their religious feelings on a leader, a human being, whose return to us might have been a fluke."

"In mid-July a GI on a guard tower was struck in the head by "a message stone" hurled by an inmate from our compound."

"On the side of the white pack was printed three scarlet words: LIBERTY, JUSTICE, PEACE; on the other side was the moon half hidden in the clouds."

"Many years later he wrote me a beautiful letter, saying he had become the accountant in his home village, where no one but he could use the abacus. He thanks me for having taught him so well and was proud to inform he that he still didn't smoke. His handwriting was clean and handsome."

"By no means should we just sit around wasting time 'like a bunch of sea cucumbers,' an expression coined by Mushu. As long as we joined hands we could do something useful."

"One evening, two days after Mushu was returned to Compound 10, I was alone in the troublemakers' cell."

"They blended light melodies into some satirical airs, which became immensely popular, such as "The Loudspeaker Always Lies, Don't Listen to It," "God, I'm Scared," and "Truman Is Done For."

"But before too long I noticed that there was a crudeness in whatever they did, as though the idea of perfection had never entered their minds. I daresay this crudeness originated from their utilitarian conceptions of the arts. They created every piece of work merely for its usefulness, like that of a weapon: each was made simply for the purpose of rousing people and boosting the fighting spirit. These creations had an instantaneous fell, a dash of spontaneity, but invariably ended in a slipshod fashion. Most of the time a man would finish writing a song or poem at one go, and he'd be proud of completing it 'without changing a single word' and even brag about it, as though to assert the the work had come purely from inspiration, which was a mark of genius. Patience and refinement were alien to those young men, who couldn't see that art didn't have to be useful or serve a purpose other than entertainment. Their works could be powerful at times, but never beautiful." -271

"I don't know. I can't read your Oriental mind, which is full of duplicity."

"Who can bear the weight of a war? To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them."