The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?

It did not matter at all that I could not catch up with her. I lived through her. What was left behind was only my shell.

all the people busy in the world were on the opposite side of where I was.

People close to you at one moment may disappear the next moment, but the sky is always there, whether you have a roof over your head or not.

SOMETIMES YOU HEAR PEOPLE say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life.

Some people count only what they seek as life: fame, wealth, adventure, happiness. What they make happen, to others and to themselves, and what they make impossible, for others and for themselves. To me, anything that happens is life.

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone.

Harmony, she explained, resides in finding the perfect balance between opposites.

Being real was like being mad, like thrashing in the most feverish dreams, like being dead while alive, or living on and on after the world considered us dead and buried.

Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.

If my geese ever dream, they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them. I live like my geese.