Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.
Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.
But later that day, the streets of Kweilin were strewn with newspapers reporting great Kuomintang victories, and on top of these papers, like fresh fish from a butcher, lay rows of people – men, women and children who had never lost hope, but had lost their lives instead.
When you touch a man’s nostalgia, he is yours.
It isn’t that i consider them brave, they are reckless, unpredictable, maddeningly unreliable. But like rogue waves and shooting stars, they also add thrills to a life that otherwise would be as regular as the tide, as routine as day passing into night.
If you asked me how I felt when they told me I would marry Wen Fu, I can say only this: It was like being told I had won a big prize. And it was also like being told my head was going to be chopped off. Something between those two feelings.
My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other’s meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.
But you can’t stay in the dark for so long. Something inside of you starts to fade and you become like a starving person, crazy-hungry for light.
A few times I invited Ba to visit me from the World of Yin. But other yin friends tell me he is stuck somewhere else, a foggy place where people believe their lies are true.
I tried to keep very still, but my heart felt like crickets scratching to get out of the cage.
But he was so attuned to my every movement I was sure he was reading my mind. HE had no inhibitions, and whatever ones he discovered I had he’d pry away from me like little treasures.
What use for? asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. You put something else on top, everything fall down.
I imagine a hundred Chinese Icaruses, molding wings out of earwax. You can’t stop people from wishing.
Suffer more now, suffer less later.
I’m not consciously hiding anything.′ After Ruth said that she wondered whether it was true. Then again, who revealed everything – the irritation, the fears? How tiresome that would be.
Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?
Precious Auntie, what is our name? I always meant to claim it as my own. Come help me remember. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don’t you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.
If someone offers to take your burden, you need to know he is serious, not just being polite and kind. Polite and kind do not last.
What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?
Why did I need to see someone else’s bad luck? To feel glad it was not mine? To scare myself into thinking it still might be?