Peter Hessler > Quotes

“The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.”
― Peter Hessler

“I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.”
― Peter Hessler

“I looked at the terraced hills and noticed how the people had changed the earth, taming it into dizzying staircases of rice paddies; but the Chinese looked at the people and saw how they have been shaped by the land.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant.”
― Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

“Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

“In China it's common for people in restaurants to complain about food. The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they've ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“Some slogans of modern political revolutionaries—“ Make America Great Again”—echo the way that Akhenaten and other pharaohs manipulated nostalgia in order to justify change.”
― Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

“The history of China, like the history of any great culture, was written at the expense of other stories that have remained silent.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

“A woman in her forties told me that she didn't understand the issue, because she was simply Old Hundred Names. That was the best part of being Old Hundred Names - they were never responsible for anything. It was the same way in any country where the citizens spoke of themselves as the "common people" but in China there was a much higher percentage of Old Hundred Names than in most places. Virtually everybody you met described himself as such, and none of them claimed to have anything to do with the way things worked.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“She and her family hadn't invited me in order to make a point about xenophobia, or anything like that. They knew that I was alone on the holiday, and i was their friend; nothing else mattered. They were simply big-hearted people and that was the best meal I ever had in China.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“Akhenaten’s kingship provides an unintended caricature of all modern leaders who indulge in the trappings of charismatic display.”
― Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

“Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn’t have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

“Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“There is hope in such a superstition; there is the illusion of control.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

“In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“All the women who worked in the shops were unmarried, and invariably they were fascinated by the relationships of their foreign bosses. “They’re equal,” Rasha, the assistant at the Chinese Lingerie Corner, said about the couple whom she worked for. “And they discuss things. They have arguments, but they talk about it. Egyptians just try to dominate.”
― Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

“Rasha had been employed by two different Chinese shops, and she said that after this experience she would never work for an Egyptian. She described the Chinese as direct and honest, and she appreciated their distance from local gossip networks. “They keep their secrets,” she said.”
― Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

“Average Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic history, but there’s also a disconnect, because the tradition of the Islamic past is stronger and more immediate. This is captured perfectly by the design of Egypt’s currency. Every denomination follows the same pattern: On one side of a bill, words are in Arabic, and there’s an image of some famous Egyptian mosque. The other side pairs English text with a pharaonic statue or monument. The implication is clear: the ancients belong to foreigners, and Islam belongs to us.”
― Peter Hessler, The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution

“... the American press tended to portray a China that was overwhelmingly negative and Beijing-centered. And yet like any waiguoren in China, I knew that I had access to a great deal of information that was unavailable to the Chinese, and as a result I often felt as if I understood the political situation better than the locals. It was impossible to avoid this type of arrogance, even though I realized that it was misleading and condescending, and I was careful not to voice my opinions openly.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“They were survivors - there was a quiet strength to the congregation, and they had none of the well-dressed smugness of American churchgoers. All of them had paid for their faith, in ways that money could not measure, and Father Li had paid the most of all.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“... a country like China is accustomed to making difficult choices that Americans might not dream of considering”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“The old man didn't say much about that experience, except that the work was difficult and served no purpose. That was often the way people described their exiles-the wasted time was the worst part.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“I sensed that this was a small part of what contributed to the passivity with regard to the Three Gorges Project in Fuling. The vast majority of the people would not be directly affected by the coming changes, and so they weren’t concerned. Despite having large sections of the city scheduled to be flooded within the next decade, it wasn’t really a community issue, because there wasn’t a community as one would generally define it. There were lots of small groups, and there was a great deal of patriotism, but like most patriotism anywhere in the world, this was spurred as much by fear and ignorance as by any true sense of a connection to the Motherland. And you could manipulate this fear and ignorance by telling people that the dam, even though it might destroy the river and the town, was of great importance to China.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“In Fuling I was always extremely conscious of my appearance, because every day I was confronted by the ways in which I looked different from the locals, but now in these desert towns I saw people with noses and hair and eyes like mine. For the first time I realized the full importance of race, not just in the way it divided people, but also in the sense of feeling a link to those who looked like you.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

“The system also maximized parental support while minimizing input to effectively zero. Parents were discouraged from entering the front gate, with the occasional exception of photographers or others with special business. On WeChat, Mamas and Babas busily engaged in fee collecting and other administrative duties, and they exchanged thousands of messages about homework, uniforms, and virtually every other topic under the sun. But I never saw a parent post advice for Teacher Zhang. There were no suggestions, no complaints, and no criticisms. The school’s message was clear: We are in charge.”
― Peter Hessler, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education

“Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.”
― Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze