A Thousand Years of Good Prayers Quotes

“Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Being a mother must be the saddest yet most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“There’s a reason for every relationship, that’s what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one’s on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don’t end up randomly as father and daughter, that’s for sure.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

“Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never send.”
― Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers