17 Quotes by Qiu Miaojin

Like death, college serves as a kind of escape hatch. But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society.

The college lifestyle is about becoming independent, with no one else around to force you to do anything. So there's this muck that hasn't been dealt with, and because all your arrangements are loose now, you have no one to hold on to, which means you get sucked into the vacuum cleaner and tossed around in it.

Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility- from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward.

My college years were spent among people who were like oil in water, unable to form bonds.

It’s easy for the body to be open to desiring different people because desire wells up and demands to be satisfied. It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh. For ultimately passion and sex aren’t only expressed physically but through a true union between two spirits.

People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money, The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fear that I was pure carrion inside.

And on it flows. I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die ... and when I'm dead for my body to be consumed by birds and beasts, leaving only the bone of my brow for Xu ... like Alexander, loyal to an everlasting love.

Separation was the thing I'd been dreading the most these past few years, and I'd been in denial that it was a fact of life. Refusing to let go, I'd practically thrown a temper tantrum. What's worse, my attempts to avoid separation had only hastened it. It explained why I'd always been so quick to lash out at those I loved.

Loyalty is not a passive, negative guardianship of the gate-- loyalty arises from the complete & utter opening & subsequent blazing forth of one's inner life. It is an active, determined desire that demands total self-awareness & deliberate engagement.