Ba Jin Quotes

You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.

The young intellectuals are all chanting, "Revolution, Revolution," but I say the revolution will have to start in our homes, by achieving equal rights for women.

Don't tell me women are not the stuff of heroes.

Today the two hundred million men in our country are entering into a civilized new world...but we, the two hundred million women, are still kept down in the dungeon.

With all my heart I beseech and beg my two hundred million female compatriots to assume their responsibility as citizens. Arise! Arise! Chinese women, arise!

Life is a journey, and you can't carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

The more you move, the stronger you'll grow, not like a tree that can be killed if you uproot it.

Autumn rain, autumn wind, they make one die of sorrow.

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

No, It's hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it's also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

My pen is alight and my body aflame. Until both burn down to ash, my love and my hate will remain here in the world.

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

English has more flexibility. It's a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

The more you move, the stronger you'll grow.

Indifference is the strongest contempt.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Studying is also important, but we must become humans first.

I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile.

Men only know if you tell them. Even though you probably want them to just know, they won't.

To me, my feelings and pride are important. Although I like you it's not enough to be used like that.

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can't change it even if you kill me.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

People are just the same. They like me if they need me, but once I'm useless, they abandon me. To survive, I need to be useful

Boys don't mature. They just age. But aged boys know how to flow with a different destination, and to shine with different color.

I miss her, but I don't want to see her.

When you come to me, wear these. On a good day, prettily.

Those who greatly enlighten delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about enlightenment are sentient beings.

Enlightenment after all is to overcome delusion, by way of sensitizing practitioners to complexities and problems of the human situation.

It's not free. I gave it to you so that you'd answer my calls right away.

Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

Nothing makes a person weaker than complicated thinking.

Someone who works only for the money will give you trouble one day because of money.

Love does not solely belong to one person. No matter how hard you try, if the feeling is not mutual, it'll be fruitless.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

Dad, would the love end just because a person dies?

I was told many times that my writing was either too Korean - or not Korean enough.

It's fun watching people get jealous over imitation bags thinking it's real.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things ... I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

I've lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

Paradoxically, the more deeply one grows in enlightenment, the more clearly one discerns one's own frailties and limitations.

Loving truth and living honestly is my attitude to life. Be true to yourself and be true to others, thus you can be the judge of your behavior.

Having inborn capabilities doesn't matter. Whether you can manage them or not, that's what determines the victory or defeat.

Show him your soft side too. Being too pretty and smart... Guys don't like when a woman is better than a man.

I’d thought there’d be no winter in the desert, but winter arrived anyway—silently, suddenly.

Our stable and eternal verities are being challenged. There's a kind of postmodern breakdown in journalism. The breadth of information sources and the speed of transmission are growing

But most good writers are Don Quixote at heart, and unreasonableness is often a condition of art.