Qiu Miaojin > Quotes

“Secretly though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn't have a whole lot going on.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Unhealthy love is two people stoking a shared fantasy of desperate beauty, weaponizing passion and desire.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Tarkovsky was right. The responsibility of the artist is to stir people’s hearts and minds toward loving others: to find the light and the true beauty of human nature within this love. Religion can rarely show us what fate means in concrete terms. Yet everyone needs to be understood and this understanding is found within each individual’s fate, one’s life journey that clarifies the way. I’m not a therapist or a philosopher or a priest. I’m an artist.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I wish I could fall in love with a man, but there are too many beautiful women.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.
It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I'd rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness worse.' I realize that's exactly what I did: I used love to fight illness, and it ruined me. I have to change my ways. I can't be like that anymore.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it's every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Life has suddenly become overcrowded. Too many people I can care for are swarming in and filling up my chest. Too many things I want to do are rushing headlong into my new life for reasons unknown to me. All of a sudden my new life is like a field overgrown with strange flowers and exotic grasses or the shimmering, starry sky of my unbridled imagination...”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Loyalty is not a passive, negative guardianship of the gate-- loyalty arises from the complete & utter opening & subsequent blazing forth of one's inner life. It is an active, determined desire that demands total self-awareness & deliberate engagement.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Human nature has its fatal weaknesses, but 'love' means embracing the whole of human nature, the bad within the good, the benign within the malicious, the beautiful within the tragic. 'Love' is the experience of this whole, its unfinished parts, including those of one's own in relation to those of the other.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Love is not merely need alone, & what is more important is loving you, & making my true nature comprehensible to you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Sweeping that other me into their arms, they led me in a dance within societal norms, along a trajectory based on a delusion. (Though I couldn't define what I was, I knew what I wasn't.)”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“It’s easy for the body to be open to desiring different people because desire wells up and demands to be satisfied. It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh. For ultimately passion and sex aren’t only expressed physically but through a true union between two spirits.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in... Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it... Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live...

Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people... I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I don't believe my spirit will disappear. As long as I have loved people fully, then I can be content fading into "Nothingness". If I'm using death to express my passion for life, then I still don't love her enough, don't love life enough. and I will reincarnate in a different form to love her and to be part of her life... So the death of my flesh really doesn't mean anything. Doesn't solve anything.

Is this a tragedy? Will there be tragedy?”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“Someday you'll find someone who's the total package. Right now you're sowing your oats, and that's not a bad thing. Life is a process of awakening by degrees, in depth and in scope. At its most profound moments, you experience wholeness.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.”
― Miaojin Qiu (邱妙津)

“Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility- from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man's greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“But let me see if - using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone - I can build you a centre.”
― Qiu Miaojin

“I love my own kind—womankind.”
― Qiu Miaojin

“I don't know when you'll make the final, lethal cut, but before that happens I will cling to you and sing with all my heart.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“My prototype of a woman was the type who would appear in hallucinations at the last moments of your freezing to death at the top of an icy mountain, a mythical beauty who blurred the line between dreams and reality. For four years, that’s what I believed. And I wasted all of my university days–during which I had the most courage and honesty I would ever have towards life–because of it.”
― Miaojin Qiu (邱妙津)

“People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money, The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fear that I was pure carrion inside.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“And on it flows. I long to lie down quietly by the banks of a blue lake and die ... and when I'm dead for my body to be consumed by birds and beasts, leaving only the bone of my brow for Xu ... like Alexander, loyal to an everlasting love.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“In the end, the world didn't owe me anything, not even half a chance. That was the hand I'd been dealt in life, and while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The whole of March 18 was so poetically and emotionally satisfying that I went a little wild.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“With sincerity, courage, & honesty, one can face death, extreme physical pain, & even extreme psychological pain. One can resist persecution from individuals, society, or government. To live in preparation of adversity & finding ways to preserve your core values --this is what it means to learn "how to live.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre