Tiananmen Square Quotes

“As I got older, I thought about aging more, as we all do. I came to think of old age as a fallibility akin to illness, something that left a person weak and in some way less than themselves. But I never used to think of my grandmother that way. Her hands with veins running across them like vines, the lines that criss-crossed her forehead, the full softness of her belly, the solidity of her arthritic shoulders, and those ancient, timeless eyes - to me these things spoke not of fallibility but of permanence. Of implacable strength, like an old gnarly tree that had been battered by wind and weather, but remained stubbornly set into the soil.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Perhaps that is the most powerful form of repression. When you can't say anything or you don't feel any more. Not because there is some external power or rule preventing you. But because there is something in yourself that prevents you. That makes you both the prison and the prisoner.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“My father. He was, I realize now, rather small for a man, both lean and compact, but as a small child you inhabit a land of giants. And fathers are the tallest giants of all.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Sometimes we feel the dark shadow of what is to come creeping closer, and yet from the bustle and light of the present – our routines, our sense of everyday normality – we convince ourselves that the darkness on the periphery is not really there. That little mistake – the confusion of names, the forgetting of something that occurred only a few hours before – we tell ourselves it is nothing, that such things happen all the time. They are not important in the scheme of things.

And we ignore that deeper, more elemental voice. The one that is telling us they are important.

That they are the most important thing of all.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“As I say, in China, you may not be particularly interested in politics. But politics sure has an interest in you.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Like so much of life, the full import of someone's words is often only revealed many years later, by which time that person has already slipped into the past.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“Like so much of life, the full import of someone's words is often only revealed many years later, by which time that person has already slipped into the past”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square

“[...]life's inevitable corollary; that imagination would always be papered over by propaganda, that the poets and peacemakers would always be stamped out by those who had force on their side.”
― Lai Wen, Tiananmen Square