The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably,...
How unlike a dead fish a live fish is.
…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy br...
And I had to get out of hating range.
Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem.
Upon Good Earth, lay the body down,open the mouth wide, let song rush through.
I'm going away anyway. I am. Do you hear me? I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. I may be ugly and clumsy, but one thing I am not, I'm not retarded. There's nothing wro...
Human beings don't work like this in China. Time goes slower there. Here we have to hurry, feed the hungry children before we're too old to work. I feel like a mother cat hunting for its kittens. She...
The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. (1983: 61)
Perhaps I made him up, and what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but child-sight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.
I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.I did swab her mouth with water, and f...
For hours she lay on the ground, alternately body and space. Sometimes a vision of normal comfort obliterated reality:
The work of preservation demands that the feelings playing about in one's guts not be turned into action. Just watch their passing like cherry blossoms.
When you raise girls, you're raising children for strangers.
The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again
Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don't sleep like eyes....Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of...
It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips – biblical god trips, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They ge...
It's the duty of artists to volunteer to do particle counting. Don't leave creation up to the accountants.
This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job...
She was one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence.