Top 60 Shelley Parker-Chan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Desire is the cause of all suffering.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

2. “However tired I am, however hard it is: I know I can keep going, because I’m alive.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

3. “Do you think for a moment I forgot? Did you think I wasn’t even man enough to care? Think me a coward who would dishonor my family and ancestors for the sake of staying alive like this? I may have lost everything important to a man, I may live in shame. But I am still a son. I will.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

4. “In that moment, Esen seemed breathtakingly handsome, so much so that Ouyang felt a sharp ache of incomprehension, that someone this perfect, so alive and so full of the pleasure of the moment, could be. It hurt like grief.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

5. “I don’t want to be great, Zhu repeated. Her desire was the radiance of the sun, an immensity that filled every part of her without exception. Who else understood what it was to feel something of this magnitude; to want something with the entirety of their self, as she did? “I want to be the greatest.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

6. “She saw someone who seemed neither male nor female, but another substance entirely: something wholly and powerfully of its own kind. The promise of difference, made real.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

7. “Most strong-willed people never understand that will alone isn’t enough to guarantee their survival. They don’t realize that even more so than will, survival depends upon an understanding of people and power.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

8. “Learn to want something for yourself, Ma Xiuying. Not what someone says you should want. Not what you think you should want. Don’t go through life thinking only of duty. When all we have are these brief spans between our nonexistences, why not make the most of the life you’re living now? The price is worth it.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

9. “He had done what he had to do, and in doing so he had destroyed the world.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

10. “As the descendant of a traitor, you might want to be careful to succeed with your next endeavor, lest people begin to wonder whether your mistakes are caused by something other than incompetence.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

11. “If you want a fate other than what Heaven gave you, you have to want that other fate. You have to struggle for it. Suffer for it.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

12. “Yes.′ Ouyang tried to laugh. It stuck in his throat like a salty sea urchin. ‘This is your death. That is mine. We’re fixed, Esen.’ The saltiness was choking him. ‘We have always been.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

13. “Inside her there was only the perfect, blank brightness of belief and desire. Desire is the cause of all suffering. The greater the desire, the greater the suffering, and now she desired greatness itself. With all her will, she directed the thought to Heaven and the watching statues: Whatever suffering it takes, I can bear it.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

14. “Pure emotions are the luxury of children and animals,” Ouyang said, and felt the terrible weight of his own tangled emotions.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

15. “It’s true there are bitten-peach men who naturally prefer other men. I wondered if that was the case with you. But, no: I think you desire men because women remind you of everything you hate about yourself. That no matter what you do, what you achieve, you’ll always be seen as more of a woman than a man. Weak. Lacking.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

16. “A man’s greatest treasure is his sons.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

17. “The memory of Esen’s fingertips on his face seared him. Part of him yearned for the debasement of that touch again, and an equal part hated Esen for having called pleasure and submissiveness out of him without even realizing what he had done. Eash part hurt. The combined pain of them crushed him.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

18. “People said that a single day without a dear friend could feel like three autumns.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

19. “To Ouyang, who had endured his entire life for the purpose of avenging his blood, it was a practice so alien as to be incomprehensible. He didn’t know what he would do if Chaghan killed Esen.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

20. “The greater the desire, the greater the suffering, and now she desired greatness itself.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

21. “If he’d been as vain and fragile as little Guo, she could have distracted him with wounding words, but how could you hurt someone who was nothing but pain?”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

22. “He had always believed revenge would change something. It was only in having done it that he understood that what had been lost was still lost forever, that nothing he could do would ever erase the shame of his own existence.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

23. “He recognized it as pure, murderous intent. He hoped the monk could feel his ill will, even at a distance, and be tormented by it for every moment until Ouyang came for him. “Account for the dead, send the injured to the back, and continue.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

24. “Prefect Fang certainly didn’t lack will! But it was you who realized that it was possible to turn a greater power against him, and who did so without hesitation. “You think about how the world works, Novice Zhu, and that – that interests me.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

25. “There is no place for you here, either! Are you a woman without shame, that you would be a burden upon my house?” The Governor was obviously the kind of person who received as much spiritual contentment from berating others as a cold man does from a bowl of soup. “No, I think not. To Khanbaliq or elsewhere, it matters little to me; I have no responsibility for my predecessor’s debts and belongings.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

26. “You never realized that it wasn’t your name they were going to call, exhorting you to reign for ten thousand years. It was mine.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

27. “Look at me and see the person who will win. The person who will rule.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

28. “I can do this. I can learn. I can survive.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

29. “It made no more sense to doubt the inevitability of fate than it did to doubt the color of the sky.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

30. “Why aren’t you happier? I’m just being who you’ve always thought I was. I’m giving you the ending you believed in.” He lingered for a moment, then pulled back. “Goodbye, brother.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

31. “But you know what’s worse than suffering? Not suffering, because you’re not even alive to feel it.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

32. “For all he had acknowledged her as a being capable of desire, he hadn’t seen her reality; that she was a woman, trapped within the narrow confines of a woman’s life, and everything that could be wanted was all equally impossible.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

33. “I need a sparring partner,” Zhu had explained cheerfully. “You’re about my level, in that you know absolutely nothing.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

34. “The girl was startled by her own anger. Heaven had promised Chongba life enough to achieve greatness, and he had given up that life as easily as breathing. He had chosen to become nothing. The girl wanted to scream at him. Her fate had always been nothing. She had never had a choice.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

35. “In having told yourself so often that I’m worthless, have you forgotten what my domain actually is? I’m an administrator. I know far better than you the nature of business, and merchants. And I know they need more than the promise of praise to be persuaded into action.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

36. “The residence’s doors banged and slammed as if by angry ghosts, and Ouyang felt his ancestors’ eyes upon him as he ate with the son of his family’s murderer, the person he held dearest in all the world.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

37. “At some point, though the girl couldn’t remember exactly when, she had become the only girl in the village... If a family had a son and a daughter and two bites of food, who would waste one on a daughter?”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

38. “He had never been able to inhabit a moment of pleasure as simply and purely as Esen did. Just knowing that it was transient – that any moment would be drained of its sweetness and vividness once it became memory – made it bittersweet to him even as it was happening.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

39. “Take him out drinking with you somewhere in Qingyuan tonight. Then on the way home,” she said, “kill him.” – Zhu.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

40. “And the boy who had been the Zhu family’s second daughter said, clearly enough for Heaven to hear, “My name is Zhu Chongba.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

41. “Where’s the fun in suffering by yourself?” Xu Da said in his good-natured way. Surprised, Zhu realized he was probably her friend. She’d never had a friend before. But she wasn’t sure suffering could be shared, even with one’s friends. Watching her father and brother die, digging their graves, kneeling for four days in front of the monastery: all of them had been acts of exquisite aloneness. She knew that when she came down to it, you survived and died alone.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

42. “She was always going to be expelled into that world of chaos and violence – of greatness and nothingness.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

43. “Lady Rui’s jaw was tight with the same intensity Zhu had glimpsed earlier: a compressed rage that had as its heart the female desire to survive all that sought to make her nothing.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

44. “In that respect, killing Chaghan hadn’t been a sin. But breaking Esen felt like one.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

45. “Desire is the cause of all suffering. All Zhu had ever desired was to live. Now she felt the pure strength of that desire inside her, as inseparable as her breath or qi, and knew she would suffer from it. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the awful magnitude of the suffering that would be required to achieve greatness in the chaotic, violent world outside.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

46. “There was nothing in her imagination to replace the formless, unchanging days of starvation. She clung to life because it seemed to have value, even if only to her.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

47. “I might not know your name,” Ma said, taking Zhu’s hand. “But I know who you are.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

48. “Strange as it is, I trust in his ability to murder creatively.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

49. “Not-wanting is a desire too; it yields suffering just as much as wanting.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan

50. “Children had taken pleasure in whispering to one another. That in other, worse-off villages, neighbors would swap their youngest children to eat... But now, seeing her father avoiding her gaze, the girl realized it wasn’t just a story... In that one terrible moment, she knew what her fate of nothing meant.”

— Shelley Parker-Chan