4 Quotes & Sayings By Yu Hua

Yu Hua is a Chinese novelist, short story writer and scholar. He was born in 1955 in Beijing. He went to study at Peking University before moving to the United States for further studies at Harvard. His first novel, "The Four Books," won him the Lu Xun Literature Prize in 1993, and his second novel, "Black Coal, Thin Ice," won the Ananda Purashkar Prize in 2000 Read more

He has been awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize. He is also a recipient of the China Writers' Union's top prize for literature, the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

1
So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature. . Yu Hua
2
If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own. Yu Hua
3
My mother often said, as long as a person is happy at work, then poverty is nothing to be ashamed of. Yu Hua