Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Quotes

“I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well-dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“La beauté d'une femme est un trésor qui n'a pas de prix.”
― Sijie Dai, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers — more's the pity.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo's favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“By the time we arrived the film had already started, and there was only standing room left behind the screen, where everything was in reverse and everyone was left-handed.”
― Sijie Dai, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Often, after extinguishing the oil lamp in our house on stilts, we would lie on our beds and smoke in the dark. Book titles poured from our lips, the mysterious and exotic names evoking unknown worlds. It was like Tibetan incense, where you need only say the name, Zang Xiang, to smell the subtle, refined fragrance and to see the joss sticks sweating beads of scented moisture which, in the lamplight, resemble drops of liquid gold.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Por lo que a las novelas largas se refiere, salvo por algunas excepciones, me mostraba bastante desconfiado. Pero 'Jean-Christophe' -de Romain Rolland-, con su empecinado individualismo, sin mezquindad alguna, fue para mí una saludable revelación. Sin él, nunca hubiera conseguido comprender el esplendor y la amplitud del individualismo. Hasta aquel encuentro robado con 'Jean-Christophe', mi pobre cabeza educada y reeducada ignoraba, sencillamente, que fuera posible luchar en solitario contra el mundo entero".”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“BA-ER-ZAR-KE’. Translated into Chinese, the name of the French author comprised four ideograms. The magic of translation! The ponderousness of the two syllables as well as the belligerent, somewhat old-fashioned ring of the name were quite gone, now that the four characters — very elegant, each composed of just a few strokes — banded together to create an unusual beauty, redolent with an exotic fragrance as sensual as the perfume wreathing a wine stored for centuries in a cellar. (Years later I learnt that the translator was himself a great writer. Having been forbidden to publish his own works for political reasons, he spent the rest of his life translating French novels.)”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Sie hat gesagt, sie habe dank Balzac etwas begriffen: daß die Schönheit der Frau ein unbezahlbarer Schatz ist.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“When she laughed I noticed an untamed quality about her eyes, which reminded me of the wild girls on our side of the mountain. Her eyes had the gleam of uncut gems, of unpolished metal, which was heightened by the long lashes and the delicate slant of the lids.”
― Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress