69 Quotes by Yiyun Li

To say we know a person is to write that person off.

But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.

... I cannot give without questioning my motives. Does giving have to do with generosity, or with the selfish comfort it brings? The self-deception it offers, when the truth is one has little, or nothing, to give? If one keeps giving, will one be good enough to be loved one day?

But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?" "Theirs.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

Don't boast because you know too little," Mrs. Pang says. "Things change a lot. Within a blink a mountain flattens and a river dries up. Nobody knows who he'll become tomorrow.

Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not.

A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen's novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly.

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.