Ryuu Kyojin

“Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“Children die, and they are not happy.
And their parents can never know if those children died because they were not happy, or they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow