The Book of Goose Quotes

“Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“SOMETIMES YOU HEAR PEOPLE say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life. A day in a cloister can be as dramatic and fatal as a day on a battlefield.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“But the world I—no, not I, Fabienne and I—had given them: Was it real? How much of it was real? We cannot measure a world with a ruler or a scale, and conclude that it is two inches, or two ounces, short of being real. All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal. If I told my parents that in Paris I was posing for the press to photograph, they would say I was making up stories no one would believe. Paris was not real to them. Neither was my fame. The world Fabienne and I made together: it was as real as our nonsense.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though it has to meet the same geographical and temporal prerequisites, is something rarer: a child does not seek to bond with another child. The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Perhaps I was born a material different from my parents. I was born a hard person, harder than most people in my life, so I have only myself to blame when I cannot feel the love of others, my parents among them. Love from those who cannot damage us irreparably often feels insufficient; we may think, rightly or wrongly, that their love does not matter at all.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Few of us would make a fool of ourselves in pressing the animals to give us serious answers about their lives, but we do that all the time to other people.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“You cannot cut an apple with an apple.

I have interrupted that living to write: the story of a faux-prodigy, which is the real story of Fabienne and Agnes, as real as on that day when we were in th graveyard, wanting, and unable, to kill each other; wanting, and unable, to save each other.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Happiness is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Morning and evening make a day. Days and nights make a week, a month, a life. Drop me into any moment, point me in any direction, and I could retrace my life. Details beget details. With all those details one might hope for the full picture. A full picture of what, though? The more we remember, the less we understand.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Think of it this way: whatever happens in our lives is not real until we write it down.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Life was real—and will always be, I hope—for them, in a way that Fabienne once wanted for us: and yet neither she nor I could make a real life for ourselves”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“But don’t count on him. He is a boy and soon he will be a man. Men have very changeable hearts.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“The journalists and critics, mindless people, refused to see that the distance between life and death was always shorter than people are willing to understand. One step further, one breath skipped - it does not take much to slip from life into death.

From life to life? That’s a long way. The cousins of my geese, the wild ones, fly over a continent. People leave their homes for new homes, new cities, new countries.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Yet in retrospect, with the present to vindicate the past, everyone can claim the illusory status of being a seer.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“In a minefield a blind person is not more likely to be killed than a person who can see.” I thought about it, and realized that she was right. Still, I told her, I would not want us to be blind. But were we not, in a sense, two blind girls? One would walk everywhere as though not a single mine were buried in the field. The other would not find the courage to take a step because the whole world was a minefield.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Only later, when I met more girls, when I got to know my nieces and nephews, did I understand that Fabienne and I shared something not often available to children (or adults, for that matter). Neither of us felt intense love toward our parents, or intense resentment. And the world was made of people who were not that different from our parents, so it was only natural that neither of us felt intense love or intense resentment toward anyone. We had each other, and for a long time that was enough.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Can a wall describe its own dimensions and texture, can a wall even sense its own existence, if not for the ball that constantly bounces off of it?”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“All the same, the doll, like all dolls, cannot even be called dead, as it was never alive.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: I can count more things I would not be able to do for them than what I could; and I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

“I do not imagine that the half of an orange facing south would have to tell the other half how warm the sunlight is.”
― Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose