I Am China Quotes

“We die, governments change, ideologies evolve, borders disappear, rivers merge, islands sink, trees rot, bones dissolve, even nature expires one day. But the universe exists, with stars or without stars, with air or without air, infinitely and unimaginably beyond man. I know that the infinite world is there beyond trivial ideologies or politics. And we only have one life to live.”
― Xiaolu Guo, I Am China

“If you spend enough time reading someone else’s thoughts, after a while their thoughts begin to infect you. Your grasp on yourself becomes tenuous. Or you begin to see that you never were the essential you in the first place, Iona thinks to herself as she takes the bus back to Angel. To be a person is to imagine being someone, and the someone you imagine most of the time is what people call ‘you’.”
― Xiaolu Guo, I Am China

“bu wen bu rou wen zi, wen zi bu ruo jian zhi. jian zhi bu ruo zhi zi, zhi zi bu ruo xing zi. Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. But involve me, I will understand. XUN ZI (PHILOSOPHER, WARRING STATES PERIOD, 475–221 BC)”
― Xiaolu Guo, I Am China

“I mentioned the importance of certain banned books, including Grossman’s Life and Fate. Afterwards,”
― Xiaolu Guo, I Am China

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street. ‘AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING’, W. H. AUDEN”
― Xiaolu Guo, I Am China