Yiyun Li Quotes

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 he...

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.

About Author

Yiyun Li (Chinese: 李翊雲 - Li Yiyun) (born November 4, 1972) is a Chinese-born writer and professor who has lived and worked in the United States since entering graduate school. She writes exclusively in English. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.

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

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.

But the thing is, a wife is a wife and you can't ditch her like a worn shirt after a life.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

As their letters became increasingly melancholy, and as they - especially Stefan Zweig - increasingly refused to believe in any hope for themselves or for mankind, Eva was never included in that despa...