The Vagrants Quotes

“He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living—that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“She sang the songs that Gu Shan must have been singing in her long years of imprisonment. The flowers of May bloom on the prairie, and the red petals fall and cover the martyrs’ blood. She had never felt this close to the people in her songs—the man and the woman who wedded themselves minutes before their execution, a jailed daughter asking her mother to bury her with her tombstone facing east so she would see the sunrise, a mother’s lullaby to her child who had been tortured to death by the secret police in front of her eyes. They had been alive once before legend had claimed them, and they lived in her singing now, sharing their secrets with her and holding her hands, waiting with her.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“what is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive? Let me tell you—history is, unlike what they say on the loudspeakers, not driven by revolutionary force but by people’s desire to climb up onto someone else’s neck and shit and pee as he or she wants. Enough bad things are done by men already, but if you add women to the equation, one might as well wish not to bring a baby into this world.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“They were all sufferers in their despicable pain, every one of them, and what right did he have to laugh at the woman whose husband was pouring his heart out to him, a man in sincere confession to a fellowman?”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“They’ll live their lives in their ignorance, but not I. Why do I read books if not to live up to principles that are worth striving for?”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“balance of the social energy, one said, and the other nodded and added that, indeed, to climb up in this country, you’d have to use someone else as a stepping stone. Neither bothered to take up his own past, as both understood that to be safe and sound in their age, they had had their share of bodies underneath their feet to keep them afloat, and those stories were no longer relevant, their shame and guilt absolved by old age.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“perhaps we could take the liberty to believe, for all we know, that this era may last for the next hundred years?—is the moaning of our bones crushed beneath the weight of empty words. There is no beauty in this crushing, and there is, alas, no escape for us now, or ever.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“The daughter who had escaped the sad fate envisioned by her mother had become a mother herself, and was now horrified that the ghost of her mother’s fear had decided to make its home in her own heart.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“People were the most dangerous animals in the world, Teacher Gu thought of telling his daughter during that visit ten years ago; stay small and unimportant, like a grain of dust,”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“but like all mothers whose children are growing up and drifting away from them, she felt an urge to stay in his shack as long as she could, to cling to anything that she could use, when he vanished from her life, to reconstruct a son from memory.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“What I own is my fortune; what I’m owed is my fate,”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“It had never occurred to Teacher Gu that he and his wife were to pay for the bullet that would take their daughter’s life, but why question such absurdity when it was not his position to ask?”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“he was then thirty-two, still too young to understand how limitless men’s desires were, or the absurdity of such greed.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“The younger sweepers in the department joked behind Shaokang’s back that he loved the brooms as his own children, but Mrs. Hua saw nothing wrong in that and knew that the joke would come only from young people who understood little of parenthood.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“In ancient tales she could have been one of those divine creatures who borrow their mothers’ wombs to enter the mortal world and make a name for themselves, as a heroine or a devil, depending on the intention of the heavenly powers.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“How many miles of river melting and how many trees of blossoms blooming would it take for the season to be called spring?”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. —W. H. AUDEN, “THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“We become prisoners of our own beliefs, with no one free to escape such a fate, and this, my dearest friend, is the only democracy offered by the world.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants

“Tarde o temprano será preciso renunciar a lo que tenemos por lo que creemos.”
― Yiyun Li, The Vagrants