Young Babylon Quotes

“That’s just the way it is sometimes: real time and time as you experience it seem like they’re happening in two different latitudes.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Ah Fang was the third. She was dangling from the sixty-five-foot mark, displaying the power of love. For buns, you’d climb to thirty feet. For love, you would climb to sixty-five. But if you climbed to a hundred feet, to the top, it was for no reason other than wanting to die. This showed that love ranked higher than hunger, but not as high as death.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Your whole life could go by without your realizing you were even living it, which made for a fairly pointless existence.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Water pumps generally had four bolts the thickness of thumbs that screwed them into the base. My job was to remove the nuts from these four bolts. Because the workshop floor was damp, over the years the nuts had rusted into iron lumps. I put the wrench in place and started to turn it forcefully, using the exact same arm motion as rowing. Later I met a man from England who’d been on the Cambridge University rowing team and had nearly competed in the Olympics. He’d talked about this noble sport, proudly rolling up his sleeves and giving me a look at his biceps, round and smooth, like half-globes. I pulled up my sleeves too and showed him my biceps, which were in the same league as his. The English man was overjoyed and asked me what sport I played. I told him I played Rusty Screws.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“I told her that being a bench worker and an electrician had taught me the value of math while leading me to the conclusion that language was a pretty screwed-up subject. Math made people smarter and smarter, while language made them dumber and dumber.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Ten years later, if you asked me to describe the appearance of the electrician team station, I'd have to say: 1) it looked like an opium den; and 2) it looked an awful lot like an opium den.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Our factory's boiler room had a big smokestack. What a waste of a sentence -- what factory's boiler room doesn't have a big smokestack?”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon

“Do you know what probability means?” “Sure,” I said, “it’s division.” “That’s right,” Pu Nani said, “You need to figure out the common denominator. Just don’t go and end up being that numerator and you’ll be alright.” Our safety instruction ended there.”
― Lu Nei, Young Babylon