Braised Pork Quotes

“How can you really know someone?' she said finally. 'Even if I take my heart out, dissect it into pieces, and explain each piece in detail to you - in the end, I would still have to stuff the whole damn thing back into my own chest”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“You're like water. Your beauty is soft and quiet.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Why did people ask each other how they were? Jia His wondered. How are you was a question that most of the time resulted in an untruthful response. She could not tell Leo that she was not well, not really. It was a dreadfully lonely experience to be asked, as if she were being given a small rock to step on to cross a deep, rough river”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“As the tears gushed out of her, she felt herself shrinking down like a bar of soap, losing her original form. She had become a shapeless and authentic version of herself. This change, she knew, was going to be irrevocable”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“It was astonishing, Jia Jia thought, how much human emotions rely on what the eyes can see. When all we can observe is endless condensed water vapour, or the horizon, or the darkness, we fell so incredibly detached from the world below us, as if all ties with our homeland have been cut.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“She could not say why; he just seemed like the kind of man who healed, rather than wounded.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“The touch of his hands on her skin seeped into her pores like water. It was as if there was a place inside her that no one had reached before, and it had been shaken awake by this man’s warm embrace. She had never felt such yearning for another person’s body – it was beyond the flesh and the consciousness, it was not merely lust, neither was it love. Perhaps the best way to describe it, she thought, was like being a lone traveller in a desert, exhausted and desolate, when the most beautiful and fruitful peach tree blossomed in front of her.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Perhaps it was the way she was dressed – blue jeans, black sweater and white trainers. She had a canvas bag with her tools inside. Her lower eye make-up was a little smudged. Leo found her to be more beautiful this way. More honest, perhaps.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“When we saw tinned pet food, we thought those were cans of dog and cat -meat. It was the cheapest food so that's what we ate! Oh, it was disgusting. And who would've thought that British people sold pet food in supermarkets!”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Sometimes, the easiest way to lose somebody for ever is to keep them around.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Everything she touched seemed to bounce away from her with stronger force.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“The orange scarf slid from Jina Jia’s shoulder and dropped into the bath.

Tomorrow, she decided, she would be painting the sea.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Her father's hands, holding the chopsticks, were slightly unsteady - something she had first noticed years ago when he took her out to lunch, but tonight, it made her heart clench and tremble.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“I watched her drift from me, getting lost further in a world that I've never come to know. I learned that there are two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them. Making your mother live the way I wanted us to be together was no less cruel than keeping a fish in a bowl”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“Disappearance, she thought, was really nothing more than departure without saying goodbye.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork

“How are you was a question that most of the time resulted in an untruthful response.”
― An Yu, Braised Pork