Dai Sijie

"I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly."

"Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me."

"“What happened to her books?” “They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burnt them in public, right in front of her apartment building.”"

"Inside, piles of books shown in the light of our torch: a company of great Western writers welcomed us with open arms. On top was our old friend Balzac, with five or six novels, then came Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Dumas, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and some English writers, too: Dickens, Kipling, Emily Brontë… We were beside ourselves. My head reeled, as if I’d had too much to drink. I took the novels out of the suitcase one by one, opened them, studied the portraits of the authors, and pass them on to Luo. Brushing them with the tips of my fingers made me feel as if my pale hands were in touch with human lives. “It reminds me of a scene in a film,” said Luo. “You know, when a stolen suitcase turns out to be stuffed with money…” “So, are you weeping tears of joy?” I said. “No. All I feel is loathing.” “Me too. Loathing for everyone who kept these books from us.”"

"I kept my door more securely locked than ever and passed the time with foreign novels. Since Balzac was Luo’s favourite I put him to one side, and with the ardour and earnestness of my eighteen years I fell in love with one author after another: Flaubert, Gogol, Melville, and even Romain Rolland."

"I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same."

"Every nook and cranny of the land came under the all-seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had cast its gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China."

"She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price."

"It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children."

"We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read."

"Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read books, even if he had to do so in secret."