Must I Go Quotes

“small talk is for neighbors and families and maybe, in your case, coworkers. You don’t waste your life having small talk with strangers.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“The moment you want to be remembered by another person you give him the power to forget you.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“Lilia's own mother, greedy for happiness that would never be reached, had settled for the rapture of misery.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“A mother is always a cautionary tale for a daughter.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“But how do you speak to a granddaughter in her dead mother's stead? Can the responsibility to the dead ever be replaced by the responsibility to the living?”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“The worst kind of marriage is the one that aims for happiness. Don’t tell me that every marriage should have that grand aspiration. A marriage reaching for happiness is like any average Joe wanting to make a cake as tall as Mount Everest and as colorful as a tropical island. And on top of that, to make it edible. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But tell me how many people can afford that kind of happiness? We can make do with a sloppy cake as long as it doesn’t topple over. Cracked, fine. A bit dense, no problem. Oversweetened, we can live with that. Underbaked, it won’t kill you.

Once I watched a movie in which a woman baked a birthday cake for her husband. And then she thought it was not perfect, and she dumped it into the trash can. Oh, I laughed so hard someone had to shush me in the theater.

But people can be stubborn. I shouldn’t have laughed at the woman in the movie. Lucy wanted her life to turn out like that perfect cake. It did not, so she dumped it, along with everything else.

Katherine, perhaps your marriage to Andy will still have some hope: if you both can learn to love a lopsided cake.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“Lilia’s mother had married the wrong man. It was like boarding a train that never takes you in the right direction, let alone to the destination you have in mind. The farther it travels, the less point there is in going on, and the lesser in getting off.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“To be forgotten was a defeat. To be doomed to remember someone was a defeat, too.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go

“Most men are undertakers of their women’s dreams. And, of course, most women are undertakers of their men’s dreams, too.”
― Yiyun Li, Must I Go