Yiyun Li

‘Any new book by Yiyun Li is a cause for celebration’ Sigrid Nunez ‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times

Wednesday’s Child

baku

When wolves tear a sheep apart with their fangs, when a hawk carries a lamb away in its claws, what's the point of shedding tears? One less in the flock, yet life wouldn't therefore soften itself for those who remain.

lt takes only a little more than nothing for desires to encroach upon one's life.

Would canceled trains only lead to more canceled trains, or would this strandedness, like ceaseless rain during a rainy season or a seemingly unfinishable novel, suddenly come to an end, on a Sunday afternoon in late May or on a snowy morning in January?

There are two types of mothers: those who have not taught their children to be kind to themselves, and those who have not learned to be kind to their children.

The saving grace, Rosalie thought, is that not all pains and not all worries are permanent. Some, time-sensitive, can be desensitized by time. How else could a parent, or anyone, go on living courageously? 

I am sure that if you had been told when you were a child about all the things that you were going to have to do, you would have thought you had better die at once, you would not have believed you could ever have the strength to do them.

An enemy could be as eternally close as a friend; a feud could make two men brothers for life. Fortunate are those for whom everyone can be turned into a stranger,

If knowing someone makes that person stay with you forever, not knowing someone does the same trick: death does not take the dead away; it only makes them grow more deeply into you

She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.

Things will go right for us if we're lucky, things will go wrong if we're not lucky, there is nothing you parents can do.

Wednesday’s Child quotes

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