Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

Every place is a good place, only time goes wrong.

Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.

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

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.

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.

Only the smaller fish pay for the goverment's face-lift. The big ones - they just become bigger and fatter.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

I would never describe a cloud as 'fluffy'—in Chinese or in English.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.

Religion without art is a dead system of dogmas which have no effect on life.

If you get labeled a winner, people come along for the ride. Might as well enjoy it and they should too.

It may not necessarily be the way I would like to see it happen, but the reality is we could still bring millions of people out of the darkness into the light.

I never knew that the lower classes had such white skins.

In real life a right-angled triangle is very unlikely to have a square on its hypotenuse.

When the wish for peace is genuine, the means for finding it is giving in a form each mind that seeks for it in honesty can understand.

The pleasant books, that silently among Our household treasures take familiar places, And are to us as if a living tongue Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces!

I just know that I love to write songs, and I have for a long time.

Bosom upon my counsel; You'll find it wholesome.