Top 50 Yiyun Li Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.”

— Yiyun Li

2. “Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.”

— Yiyun Li

3. “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.”

— Yiyun Li

4. “There’s a reason for every relationship, that’s what the saying means. Husband and wife, parents and children, friends and enemies, strangers you bump into in the street. It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved one’s on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe. People don’t end up randomly as father and daughter, that’s for sure.”

— Yiyun Li

5. “I would never describe a cloud as ‘fluffy’ – in Chinese or in English.”

— Yiyun Li

6. “This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness.”

— Yiyun Li

7. “Life can be reset, it seems to say; time can be separated. But that logic appears to me as unlikely as traveling to another place to become a different person. Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.”

— Yiyun Li

8. “What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.”

— Yiyun Li

9. “The weak-minded choose to hate,” she said. “It’s the least painful thing to do, isn’t it?”

— Yiyun Li

10. “To say we know a person is to write that person off. This is at times life’s necessity. We run out of time or patience or curiosity; or we depart, willingly or not, from the situation that makes investigation possible and necessary. A person written off may become a character – depending on the charity of memory.”

— Yiyun Li

11. “A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.”

— Yiyun Li

12. “What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?”

— Yiyun Li

13. “But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others – a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.”

— Yiyun Li

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Once in a while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. “You may not remember me,” these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten.”

— Yiyun Li

17. “Regarding heroism, I grew up in a culture where you learn about heroes and heroines all the time. In a way, when you call someone a hero or heroine, it’s the same as calling them a villain.”

— Yiyun Li

18. “Reticence is a natural state. It is not hiding. People don’t show themselves equally and easily to all. Reticence doesn’t make one feel lonely as hiding does, yet it distances and invalidates others.”

— Yiyun Li

19. “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

20. “Nabokov once answered a question he must have been tired of being asked: “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language.” That something is called a tragedy, however, means it is no longer personal. One weeps out of private pain, but only when the audience swarms in to claim understanding and empathy do they call it tragedy. One’s grief belongs to oneself; one’s tragedy, to others.”

— Yiyun Li

21. “What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance.”

— Yiyun Li

22. “Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment’s face-lift. The big ones – they just become bigger and fatter.”

— Yiyun Li

23. “To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.”

— Yiyun Li

24. “Much of what one does – to avoid suffering, to seek happiness, to stay healthy – is to keep a safe space for one’s private language.”

— Yiyun Li

25. “I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence.”

— Yiyun Li

26. “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

27. “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

28. “People who have not experienced a suicidal urge miss a crucial point. It is not that one wants to end one’s life, but that the only way to end the pain – that eternal fight against one’s melodrama so that it does not transgress – is to wipe out the body. I distrust judgments – Mann’s or anyone’s – on suicide. They are, in the end, judgments on feelings.”

— Yiyun Li

29. “Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.”

— Yiyun Li

30. “Sometimes I imagine that writing is a survey I carry out, asking everyone I encounter, in reality or in fiction: How much of your life is lived to be known by others? To be understood? How much of your life is lived to know and understand others? But like all surveys the questions are simplifications. How much does one trust others to be known, to be understood; how much does one believe in the possibilities of one person’s knowing and understanding another.”

— Yiyun Li

31. “To kill time – an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.”

— Yiyun Li

32. “I always tell my students to go back after a hundred pages and rewrite from the beginning. It’s really harder if you’ve already finished four hundred pages and realize the first hundred aren’t working.”

— Yiyun Li

33. “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

34. “The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.”

— Yiyun Li

35. “Who among us dares to assert that our memories are not tainted by time, sweetest poison and bitterest antidote, untrustworthy ally, and reliable annihilator?”

— Yiyun Li

36. “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

37. “People don’t vanish from one’s life; they come back in disguise.”

— Yiyun Li

38. “Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.”

— Yiyun Li

39. “Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope.”

— Yiyun Li

40. “To say we know a person is to write that person off.”

— Yiyun Li

41. “A woman accepted anything from life and made it the best; a man bargained for the better but also the less perfect.”

— Yiyun Li

42. “Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.”

— Yiyun Li

43. “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

44. “I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.”

— Yiyun Li

45. “Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.”

— Yiyun Li

46. “Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living. Loneliness is the inability to speak with another in one’s private language. That emptiness is filled with public language or romanticized connections. But one must be cautious when assuming meaning. A moment of recognition between two people only highlights the inadequacy of language. What can be spoken does not sustain; what cannot be spoken undermines.”

— Yiyun Li

47. “Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.”

— Yiyun Li

48. “Unsent letters carry a kind of cruelty. A letter is written as a space shared by two people; by not sending it, its writer claims the power to include and exclude the recipient simultaneously. Out of cowardice or control an act is performed in the name of caring or discretion. Unsent letters should never be written. But what difference is there between an unsent and an unwritten letter? The truth is already there. Self-imposed silence speaks, too, though not to communicate but to punish.”

— Yiyun Li

49. “Some people live by images, some by sounds. It’s words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.”

— Yiyun Li

50. “He had always thought that the worst form of grieving was to treat the afterlife as a continuity of living – that people would carry on the burden of living not only for themselves but also for the dead.”

— Yiyun Li