Mandarin Quotes

“He and Jia occasionally made cutting remarks about various Clave members to each other in Mandarin. She was a nice lady.”
― Cassandra Clare, The Red Scrolls of Magic

“Charlie glanced at the poster hanging on the door, which announced the store's annual Hungry Ghost Festival, just four days away. It used to be Charlie's favorite holiday, from the puppet shows at the community center to the paper lanterns that his mom hung outside and to the food- especially the food. Sautéed pea shoots. Roasted duck. Pineapple cakes that fit into the palm of your hand. Then there was his grandma's shaved ice with all the toppings- chopped mangos, condensed milk poured on thick, and her famous mung beans in sugary syrup. He could eat a whole bowl of those.”
― Caroline Tung Richmond, Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love

“The acceptance of the truth now appears to be increasingly based on the acceptability of the appearance and Mandarin reputation of the person proclaiming it. We’re increasingly in the grip of the logical fallacy of the appeal to authority. When people appeal to authority, they are claiming that something must be true because it is said or believed by someone who is said to be an “authority” on the subject. Anyone with an “out there” image is deemed automatically not to be an authority because the Mandarins have brainwashed everyone to believe that authorities must look as bland as possible, just like them.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
― Gary Jennings, The Journeyer

“In terms of China's history, language, and culture, I find the more I dig, the deeper the hole gets.”
― Stewart Lee Beck

“In the era of Ai, we're teaching a parrot to sing opera in Mandarin! ”
― Dipti Dhakul

“...Mandarin sounds like someone chewing a brandy glass full of wasps and Cantonese sounds like people having an argument. The written language of both dialects, incidentally, is the same.”
― John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbor