Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

by Yiyun Li

Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

Our memories tell more about now than then.

The present does not surrender so easily to manipulation.

En comparación con el pasado.

The past I cannot trust because it could be tainted by my memory. The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution. The present—what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved.

I had only wanted to stay invisible, but there as elsewhere invisibility is a luxury.

One hides something for two reasons: either one feels protective of it or one feels ashamed of it. And it is not always the case that the two possibilities can be separated.

A WORD I hate to use in English is I. It is a melodramatic word. In Chinese, a language less grammatically strict, one can construct a sentence with an implied subject pronoun and skip that embarrassing I, or else replace it with we.

Living is not an original business.

A person, by dismissing her own self with a morbid carelessness, could easily bulldoze another person’s beliefs.

To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.

There is no time to be wasted between one drama and the next; in fact, there is no life to be lived between dramas.

A life lived to forget is a life lived to remember, too.

The intense emotions around suicide—anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation—demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.

One’s wish to die can be as blind and intuitive as one’s will to live, yet the latter is never questioned.

But knowing is not understanding.

How much of your life is lived to be known by others? To be understood? How much of your life is lived to know and understand others?

Anyone reading one’s words is able to take something from one.

Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously.

A writer’s cruelty is to exile a real person to fiction.

A reader’s cruelty is to return writers to characters.

TO OWN—A HOUSE, a life on a quiet street, a language, a dream—is to allow oneself to be owned, too.

one’s relationship with a native language is similar to that with the past. There is not a moment one could point to and say: this is the beginning of my past, or this is the beginning of my relationship with my mother tongue, up until that moment I was free.

We can kill time, but language kills us.

What I underlined and reread: Are they her thoughts or mine?

does one need a language to feel?

but the past, having passed, always comes back to claim what it has no right to.

A young person, beginning to read seriously, tends to live—infatuated, even—with one book at a time.

But cruelty and kindness are not old stories, and never will be.