Conner

“So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon a line in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhood memory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart, returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own. Heine put into words the feeling I had as a child when I lay napping in the morgue. And that, I tell myself, is literature.”
― Yu Hua, 十個詞彙裡的中國

“The revolutions of the twentieth century, the liberation of the masses by production, created private life but gave nothing to fill it with.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

“She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer