15 Quotes & Sayings By Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li was born in Beijing, China. She attended Harvard University, where she received her MFA in creative writing. Her first novel, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2009), was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Li's second novel, Here, There Is Nothing (2011), was awarded the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and her third novel, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2013), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Read more

Yiyun Li lives in New York City.

1
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. Yiyun Li
People don't vanish from one's life they come back in...
2
People don't vanish from one's life they come back in disguise. Yiyun Li
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.
3
A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time. Yiyun Li
I have spent much of my life turning away from...
4
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. Yiyun Li
5
There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one's mind. Yiyun Li
6
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? Yiyun Li
7
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. Yiyun Li
8
The weak-minded choose to hate, " she said. "It's the least painful thing to do, isn't it? Yiyun Li
9
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. Yiyun Li
10
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. Yiyun Li
11
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. Yiyun Li
12
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday. Yiyun Li
13
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. Yiyun Li
14
But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life. Yiyun Li