Yiyun Li

Never would I have a more memorable time than the month I spent in the mountains, though I wonder, when I say this, if it appears so only because it is our nature to make a heaven out of places to which we can never return.

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?

When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves.

There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind.

I have spent much of my life turning away from the scripts given to me, in China and in America; my refusal to be defined by the will of others is my one and only political statement.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

People don't vanish from one's life they come back in disguise.

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

She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

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

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

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.

The weak-minded choose to hate," she said. "It's the least painful thing to do, isn't it?