Yiyun Li Quote

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 despair. This impunity is the same wishful thinking as when parents want to spare their children the difficulties they themselves have had to live through. Yet without that wishfulness, what are the parents doing but letting the melodrama of their own memories dictate the next generation’s fate?

Yiyun Li

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 despair. This impunity is the same wishful thinking as when parents want to spare their children the difficulties they themselves have had to live through. Yet without that wishfulness, what are the parents doing but letting the melodrama of their own memories dictate the next generation’s fate?

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About Yiyun Li

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.