69 Quotes by Yiyun Li

Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language.” That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.

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.

People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain – that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress – is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments – Mann’s or anyone’s – on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.

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

Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.

I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence.

I am not and autobiographical writer – one can’t be without a solid and explicable self – and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give – sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one’s expectation but its internal need to feel.

When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we’re experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.