Quotes from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“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.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“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.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“In the end we had changed the position of the hands so many times that we had no idea what the time really was.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Mozart is thinking of Chairman Mao”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“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.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“The only thing Luo was really good at was telling stories. A pleasing talent to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand-and-One-Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers — more's the pity.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“La beauté d'une femme est un trésor qui n'a pas de prix.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Often, after extinguishing the oil lamp in our house on stilts, we would lie on our beds and smoke in the dark. Book titles poured from our lips, the mysterious and exotic names evoking unknown worlds. It was like Tibetan incense, where you need only say the name, Zang Xiang, to smell the subtle, refined fragrance and to see the joss sticks sweating beads of scented moisture which, in the lamplight, resemble drops of liquid gold.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“By the time we arrived the film had already started, and there was only standing room left behind the screen, where everything was in reverse and everyone was left-handed.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

“Por lo que a las novelas largas se refiere, salvo por algunas excepciones, me mostraba bastante desconfiado. Pero 'Jean-Christophe' -de Romain Rolland-, con su empecinado individualismo, sin mezquindad alguna, fue para mí una saludable revelación. Sin él, nunca hubiera conseguido comprender el esplendor y la amplitud del individualismo. Hasta aquel encuentro robado con 'Jean-Christophe', mi pobre cabeza educada y reeducada ignoraba, sencillamente, que fuera posible luchar en solitario contra el mundo entero".”
― Dai Sijie, quote from Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

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Popular quotes

“As people, other people, living in a house who . . . borrow things?"
Mrs. May laid down her work. "What do you think?" she asked.
"I don't know," Kate said, pulling hard at her shoe button. "There can't be. And yet"-she raised her head-"and yet sometimes I think there must be."
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“But pearls are for tears, the old legend says," Gilbert had objected.
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“We all stared at the scoreboard in stunned silence. Only Carter was able to get anything out.
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"That doesn't make any sense," said Roger.
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“Tell them they can be great someday, like us. Tell them they belong among us, no matter how we treat them. Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default. Them them there is a standard for acceptance; that standard is simply perfection. Kill those who scoff at those contradictions, and tell the rest that the dead deserved annihilation for their weakness and doubt. Then they'll break themselves trying for what they'll never achieve”
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.