Xiaolu Guo > Quotes

“It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.”
― Xiaolu Guo

“About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing.
I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person's entire life.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“In China, we say: 'There are many dreams in a long night.' It has been a long night, but I don't know if I want to continue the dreams. It feels like I am walking on a little path, both sides are dark mountains and valleys. I am walking towards a little light in the distance. Walking, and walking, I am seeing that light diminishing. I am seeing myself walk towards the end of the love, the sad end.
I love you more than I loved you before. I love you more than I should love you. But I must leave. I am losing myself. It is painful that I can't see myself. It is time for me to say those words you kept telling me recently. 'Yes, I agree with you. We can't be together.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“People always say it's harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite—a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Never look back to the past, never regret, even if there is emptiness ahead.' But I couldn't help it. Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I thought that you would bring everything into my life. I thought you are my Jesus. You are my priest, my light. So I always believed you are my only home here. I feel so insecure because I am so scared of losing you. That's why I want to control you. I want you are in my view always and I want cut off your extension to the world and your extension to the others.
I think of those days when I travelled in Europe on my own. I met many people and finally I wasn't so afraid of being alone. Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn't be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn't be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“But what so different of eating plants? Everything has it's life. If you are so pure, why not just stop eating? So you can have no shit?”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want to be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow,”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“I don't feel naked around you anymore. ”
― Xiaolu Guo

“Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before out births, for instance and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Maybe I not need feeling lonely, because I can talk to other "me." Is like seeing my two pieces of lips speaking in two languages at same time. Yes, I not lonely, because I with another me. Like Austin Powers with his Mini Me”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“In China we believe "rob the rich to feed the poor." But robbers here have no poetry.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“Red's world, you see, is a closed circle. Not that it matters. I know that I'm a closed circle, too, and it's all I can do to find some starting point from myself, while at the same time trying to find my own terminus. There's no way I'm ever going to find my beginning or end in somebody else's circle. Two people together never add up to anything more than one person added to another. That we continue to add ourselves up in this way is the reason human beings will always be lonely.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Village of Stone

“Everyone tries to be an optimist. But being an optimist is a bit boring and not honest. Losers are more interesting than winners.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“People desperately want to spend their money. Maybe they think that's the most effective way to feel alive.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Lovers in the Age of Indifference

“Yours is the face of a post-modern woman.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“In China we say, "You can't expect both ends of a sugar cane are as sweet." Sometimes love can be ugly. But one still has to take it and swallow it.”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful?”
― Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

“Hot coffee is like a warm-blooded man. They both give you the courage to face a new day.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“If I'm sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I'd cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn't stand it and I'd swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a clidd. So, I come here instead where there's so much water already I can weep in peace.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Humans need cages around their bodies – wombs, houses, coffins.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I felt an urge to conquer this new village.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“They think there are only two kinds of young women in China: good girls or prostitutes.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth