Where Reasons End Quotes

“Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Wishing only wounds the heart.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Dreams are but prologue to days, epilogue to other days, written by our faltering minds.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Words provided to me-- loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma-- never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one's attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, i thought, would be perfect for that role.

You can't be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I've found a perfect enemy in myself.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“For some people a façade is necessary even with friends”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“What's wrong with being sharp and bright? Nikolai said.
The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It's good to avoid suffering when one can.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“A parent should never be a child’s biographer, I thought.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“This real night is and will be a permanent part of our life.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Does a person commit suicide because he doesn’t want to live, or doesn’t know how to live?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“And not knowing must be close to what people call a wound.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“How can one know a fact without accepting it?”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Silence is the best defense and the best offense.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred, I said.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Do you feel settled?”

"If you mean something sinking to the bottom, he said, yes, I feel quite settled. Sedimented."

"What is it that sedimented?" I asked.

“Everything about me that used to disturb me.” He said. “I’m all clear now, clear and perfect, just the way I want.”

“Nothing will come to disturb the sediment again?”

“What probability to you think for that to happen?”

I did not know if I were sad or relieved, or sadder because I was relieved.

“You see, that is your problem. When you don’t have an expert command of adjectives, you don’t know how you feel.”

“Perhaps I don’t want to know.” I said.

“Why then are we talking?”

“I don’t talk to you to figure out how I feel.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“It’s lazy minded of you to say you don’t believe in something that you don’t understand.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“A noun is a self-defeating wall, an adjective is a tenacious window.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“He used to bake on weekends and on the days when he did not have much homework. He used to bake all the time, and how could we reproduce all the time? Butter and cream and honey and cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg and clove and all the jars and bottles on his baking shelf: No one's words, Proust's included, could bring back to life their warm fragrance mixed with the scents of the winter rain of California and the wet eucalyptus leaves. You almost an invention to immortalize scents, Mr. Edison. Without that our memory is incomplete.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“How can anyone ask a question starting with that silly phrase How can anyone.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End

“Yet all these promises were as inadequate as love, promise and love being two anchors of cliché-land.”
― Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End