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Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li Books

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“I now memorize ancient poems from my mother's books. I reread the romantic stories and never tire of them. They are terrible stories, terribly written, yet they are about fate, a kinder fate that unites one with her lover despite hardships and improbability—and they never fail to give me a momentary hope, as they must have given my mother years ago, as if all will be well in the end.”

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Book:Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
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“It is difficult for anyone to watch someone close suffer. The grief comes from not understanding the pain, and from knowing that suffering, even when it ends, will live on as memory. A child does not, and should not, understand her parents' memories, yet this incomprehension does not offer exemption. The child in every one of us carries the burden of memory's melodrama, not only our own, but those before our time.”

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Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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“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.”

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Book:The Book of Goose
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“Childhood companionship is forced upon the children (...) Childhood friendship, though is has ti 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.”

ChildrenFriendship
Book:The Book of Goose
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“Patient stated that she felt like a burden to loved ones" - much later, when I read the notes from the emergency room, I did not have any recollection of the conversation. 'A burden to loved ones': this language must have been provided to me. I would never use the phrase in my thinking or writing. But my resistance has little to do with avoiding a platitude. To say a burden is to grant oneself weight in other people's lives: to call them loved ones is to fake one's ability to love. One does not always want to subject oneself to self-interrogation imposed by a cliché.”

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Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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“Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one's real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one's days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.”

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Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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“Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population. But sometimes children die before their parents. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options they either live or follow their children down to Hades. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest:to live after their deaths.”

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Book:Things in Nature Merely Grow
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“Only by fully preparing oneself for people's absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. It has not occurred to me, until I met Trevor, to ask: 'Will I see you again?' What had precluded me from asking is this: 'Perhaps I won't see you again, and if so, goodbye for now and goodbye forever.”

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Book:Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
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“In China, your freedom is always limited, but this limitation applies to almost everyone. If someone does injustice to you, though, you have to find a way to avenge yourself - even by illegal measures. In a sense, injustice is more personal. This idea has always been in Chinese history. I think we read about freedom of speech, or lack of freedom of speech, in China so often. But I don't think people here in America think about how justice, or the idea of justice, is so important in a Chinese setting. It's probably more important than freedom of speech in the Chinese mindset at this moment.”

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Author:Yiyun Li
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