Taipei Story Quotes

“That was what I was afraid of. Emotional vertigo. If I began to walk, I didn't know whether or when I would fall.”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.”
― R. F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“And this really affected me, because I always felt that the purpose of language learning was to communicate with another person. Learning Chinese was about access. I wanted to talk to my family- that was the entire point. But now I'm wondering: What happens when you're late to the conversation? What does Chinese do for you then? I wanted to wait until I became a person he could really converse with. But I wasn't fast enough. All I have now are questions, but at least I have learned to phrase them in his terms. I can move through the world with his language, at least a little. That will have to be enough.”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“But now the apartment was silent, and there was nothing so frightening as the nights when sleep wouldn't come and the dark was as vast as my imagination- when I had to fill the void with everything I had ever done wrong.”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“I took her in. Saw the lines around her eyes, the gray streaks of hair, the downward slope of her shoulders. If felt like the first time that I had looked at her, really examined her features, rather than filling her in with the memory I knew as Mom. My mother had always been a fixture, an unchanging authority. To me, my parents belonged to that category "middle-aged," which was in fact ageless and infinite, and now for the first time in my life, I saw she was closer to an old woman than a young one.”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“It was the simple logic that what goes up must come down. If history could smash maps and close borders and scatter families across the world, if history could cause all this destruction in the span of several decades, why wouldn't the tides turn back? Why couldn't the authoritarians lose power? Why couldn't the exiled go home?”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“I wanted to say that I had read Zhang Ailing only in English translation, but that even in translation her descriptive power and insight into interpersonal relationships had floored me, and that I found her grayscale author photo in which she wore an elegant cheongsam both alluring and pretentious, that I had spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be a female author who wanted critical acclaim and also to look pretty.”
― R. F. Kuang, Taipei Story

“We bought a bushel of rust-red lychees the size of our palms, which exploded with juice so sticky that we could only eat them outside in the park, hunched over plastic bags to catch the drips, and even so, ants formed hopeful lines around our feet. I had never tasted lychees like this in the States. Those brown, shriveled things you could only find three months of the year at 99 Ranch Market—they did not compare.”
― R.F. Kuang, Taipei Story