The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

What’s the difference between knowing a story and writing it out? But the questions I should have asked, which I did not know how when we were younger, were: Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it

I now have the answer, for her and for myself. The world has no use for who we

are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do...

We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too. Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: I can count more things I would not be able to do for them than what I could; and I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.

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.

We cannot measure a world with a ruler or a scale, and conclude that it is two inches, or two ounces, short of being real. All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal.

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.

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

was not the first trespasser in paradise, but unlike other violators, my punishment was not banishment.

Rather, my sentence was to testify to its marvels.

became my belief that my only hope for escape was to write the book that everybody wanted. Only then would I be allowed to return h...

hard life, unlike what we were taught at school, did not make us virtuous; the hardest life was the most boring, the most unrewarding. How else could we overcome this boredom but to bring ourselves up in our own make-believe, which, as we grew older, had become more elaborate, more exhilarating, and, most of all, closer to the truth? What was wrong with the muddy muck underneath our feet if we could give it the power to track unseen beings wandering around in the dark?

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