Emily Ding

“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.”
― Annie Proulx