YellowG > YellowG's Quotes

“I liked the way it felt to speak Chinese—the elegant rise and fall of the tones, the sensuous way my tongue flitted about my mouth and the economy of a language that needed very few words to say a lot. Speaking good French demands control of one’s lips; American English relies on an open mouth; but Chinese can be spoken perfectly even through clenched teeth. “Picture your tongue as a butterfly,” one of my instructors would say, and there it would be, flapping against my mouth and banging against my teeth as I sought to harness it and speak Chinese.”
― John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

“The idioms also revealed that Chinese shared a barnyard bawdiness with American English. My favorite was “taking off your pants to fart”—wasted effort.”
― John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

“Like all Chinese youth, the first sentence he’d learned in school was “Long live Chairman Mao!” To be carrying out the chairman’s orders gave the precocious eleven-year-old a powerful sense of purpose and self-worth. “The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the people,” the team would chant together.”
― John Pomfret, Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China

“The train gives off an earsplitting insect hum. It seems like you’re watching something physically impossible, like a person lifting a house, or hearing a joke so funny the laughter threatens to rip you apart, and then, with a puff of air, it’s over. When”
― Matthew Amster-Burton, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

“Depuis les siècles des siècles, les rillettes sont du Mans, le piment d’Espelette, le cassoulet de Castelnaudary, la poularde de Bresse, les escargots de Bourgogne, l’andouille de Vire, la saucisse de Strasbourg, la potée est limousine, l’aligot auvergnat, le poussin au riesling alsacien, la bouillabaisse de Marseille, le coq au vin du Berry, la quiche lorraine, la tête de veau sous la mère de Corrèze, l’huître de Marennes, la sole est dieppoise, la mouclade est de La Rochelle, le saucisson chaud de Lyon, les tripes de Caen, le morteau de Morteau et le camembert de Camembert. Chaque petit Français apprend cela plus sûrement que l’orthographe.”
― François Hauter, Le bonheur d'être français (Documents)

“que d’autres enfants que les nôtres puissent s’enchanter de réciter : « Tâche que les tasses de thé tachetées que tu as achetées soient attachées et tassées » !”
― François Hauter, Le bonheur d'être français (Documents)

“During the eleventh century, men at the court of Song Dynasty China came to imagine in a new way the political entity to which they belonged. They started to articulate with far greater precision its spatial extent – which they now saw as bounded by natural topographic features as well as by the historical Great Wall – while simultaneously de-emphasizing an older theory of sovereignty premised on the idea of universal empire.”
― Nicolas Tackett, The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and the Forging of an East Asian World Order

“The sovereign being equipped with virtue, and his counsellors with wisdom, it remains only for the common people to learn their duties and fulfil them. Since they are not capable of understanding the abstract morality of the sages, of determining for themselves what is correct conduct, they must be instructed by means of concrete and positive precepts. It is these precepts which are embodied in the Rites. The good citizen is one who fulfils regularly and completely his ritual obligations. Instead of a code of morals he has a code of manners.”
― George Bailey Sansom, Japan: A Short Cultural History

“poker is an incredibly mathematical game that depends on making probabilistic judgments amid uncertainty, the same skills that are important in any type of prediction.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Players from Sweden, Lebanon, and China, for instance, have a reputation for being more aggressive than those from France, England, or India. Younger players are presumed to be looser and more aggressive than older ones. Men are assumed to be more likely to bluff than women. These stereotypes, like any others, are not always true: at the hold ’em games I used to play in at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, the best players were very often women, and they were good in part because they were much more aggressive than their opponents assumed.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction