Eileen Chang > Quotes

“Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...”
― Eileen Chang

“She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen — a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy satin. The years passed; the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“In that little pocket-size world of his, he was the absolute master.”
― Eileen Chang

“Shijun, we can't go back.”
― Eileen Chang

“Thinking is painful business.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“You meet the one you meet amongst thousands and tens of thousands of people, amidst thousands and tens of thousands of years, in the boundless wilderness of time, not a step sooner, not a step later. You chance upon each other, not saying much, only asking softly, “Oh, you are here, also?”
― Eileen Chang

“I want you to know there’s someone in this world who’s yours always. Please know that, forever and wherever. Yours, always”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“If you knew the old me, maybe you could forgive the current me.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“Oh, it’s not important. It’s just a glove!” Manzhen spoke lightly, but in fact she was upset. Sometimes she focused so hard on little things she was almost small-minded. But Shijun, when he looked back at it all, treasured this trait of hers. Manzhen was the kind of person who, once something came into her possession, cherished it till it became, in her eyes, the best thing ever. He knew, because he’d once been hers.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Maybe every man has two such women—at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is "moonlight in front of my bed." Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“They simply had to fill this terrifying emptiness–otherwise, their brains might start working. Thinking is painful business.”
― Eileen Chang, Sealed Off

“Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.”
― Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution

“She felt surprised that it was still light outside, as if inside the store she had lost all sense of time. The pavement around her was heaving with humanity; pedicab after pedicab rushed past on the road, all of them taken. Pedestrians and vehicles flowed on by, as if separated from her by a wall of glass, and no more accessible than the elegant mannequins in the window of the Green House Ladies’ Clothing Emporium—you could look, but you couldn’t touch. They glided along, imperviously serene, as she stood on the outside, alone in her agitation.”
― eileen chang, Lust, Caution

“Opening her handbag, she took out a small bottle of perfume and touched the stopper behind her ears. Its cool, glassy edge felt like her only point of contact with tangible reality.”
― Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution and Other Stories

“Her experience of the world was still not deep enough to help her see that cruelty and cowardice go hand in hand; and that those who, when they’re riding high, transgress flagrantly are later crushed by the slightest touch of hardship, at which they pull long, sad faces.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Maybe a love like that came to a person only once in a lifetime? Once was enough, maybe.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Her voice, her smile, her every gesture was utterly familiar to him: these traces of her presence had danced in his dreams for years, and now he beheld them with waking eyes. Fate is cruel, but it’s a cruelty that suffuses sweetness into the suffering.”
― Eileen Chang

“All the times he’d dreamed of seeing her again—it was happening now, but was utterly unlike anything he’d imagined. A feeling he could not describe, his mind blank, his heart dazed.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Small white clouds floated in the blue sky above, and on the street a flute vendor was playing the flute - a sharp, soft, sinuous, Oriental tune that twisted and turned in the ear like embroidery, like a picture of a dream in a novel, a trail of white mist coming out from under the bed curtain and unfurling all sorts of images, slowly uncoiling like a lazy snake, till finally the drowsiness is just too great, and even the dream falls asleep.”
― Eileen Chang

“像“斯巴達克斯”里奴隸起義的叛軍在晨霧中遙望羅馬大軍擺陣，所有的戰爭片中最恐怖的一幕，因為完全是等待。”
― 張愛玲

“In truth, every time she was with Yee she felt cleansed, as if by a scalding hot bath; for now everything she did was for the cause.”
― Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution

“Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin Chinese.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“She’d seen it clearly all along. It was as she said: they couldn’t go back. Now he understood why he’d felt trapped in a daze today. He’d been fighting against time. Their last parting had been so sudden, so unexpected, they’d not had a chance to say goodbye. When they walked out of this room today, they’d be saying goodbye forever. It was completely clear, like death.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Her broken sentences hung in midair like the pendulums of several clocks, each ticking along at a different speed, each following its own logic and reaching its own conclusions, each rising up at a different moment, each hammering its bell at a different time....”
― Eileen Chang

“Fundamental truth is unyielding, like a mountain.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“When you meet the one among the millions, when amid millions of years, across the borderless wastes of time, you happen to catch him or her, neither a step too early nor a step too late, what else is there to do except to ask softly: "So you're here, too?”
― Eileen Chang, Written on Water

“The moon of thirty years ago has gone down long since and the people of thirty years ago are dead but the story of thirty years ago is not yet ended—can have no ending.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City

“我要你知道，在这个世界上，总有一个人是会永远等着你的。无论什么时候，无论在什么地方，总会有这么一个人”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“Love is not passion, perhaps. Not yearning either, but the experience of time, the part of life that accumulates over the months and years.”
― Eileen Chang, Half a Lifelong Romance

“She felt a numb chill creeping up the back of her head; the display windows downstairs and the glass door between them seemed to be broadening out, growing taller, as if behind her were an enormous, two-story-high expanse of brilliant, fragile glass, ready to disintegrate at any moment. But even as she felt almost dizzy with the precariousness of her situation, the shop seemed to be blanketing her in torpor. Inside she could hear only the muffled buzz of the city outside— because of the war, there were far fewer cars on the road than usual; the sounding of a horn was a rarity. The warm, sweet air inside the office pressed soporifically down on her like a quilt. Though she was vaguely aware that something was about to happen, her heavy head was telling her that it must all be a dream.”
― Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City