Dai Sijie · 184 pages
Rating: (45.7K votes)
“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
Dai Sijie
Born place: in Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Born date March 2, 1954
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“Hey. What is it that famous person said? 'It'll all work out in the end, and if it doesn't, that means it's not the end yet'?”
― Lauren Myracle, quote from Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks
“Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order)
L. 580.0
Family 400.0
Brushing tongue 150.0
Earplugs 100.0
Bill-paying 52.0
Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of 45.0
Sunlight makes you cheerful 40.0
Traffic frustration 38.0
Penguin books, all 35.0
Job, should I quit? 34.0
Friends, don't have any 33.0
Marriage, a possibility? 32.0
Vending machines 31.0
Straws don't unsheath well 28.0
Shine on moving objects 25.0
McCartney more talented than Lennon? 23.0
Friends smarter, more capable than I am 19.0
Paper-towel dispensers 19.0
"What oft was thought, but ne'er" etc. 18.0
People are very dissimilar 16.0
Trees, beauty of 15.0
Sidewalks 15.0
Friends are unworthy of me 15.0
Indentical twins separated at birth, studies of traits 14.0
Intelligence, going fast 14.0
Wheelchair ramps, their insane danger 14.0
Urge to kill 13.0
Escalator invention 12.0
People are very similar 12.0
"Not in my backyard" 11.0
Straws float now 10.0
DJ, would I be happy as one? 9.0
"If you can't get out of it, get into it" 9.0
Pen, felt-tip 9.0
Gasoline, nice smell of 8.0
Pen, ballpoint 8.0
Stereo systems 8.0
Fear of getting mugged again 7.0
Staplers 7.0
"Roaches check in, but they don't check out" 6.0
Dinner roll, image of 6.0
Shoes 6.0
Bags 5.0
Butz, Earl 4.0
Sweeping, brooms 4.0
Whistling, yodel trick 4.0
"You can taste it with your eyes" 4.0
Dry-cleaning fluid, smell of 3.0
Zip-lock tops 2.0
Popcorn 1.0
Birds regurgitate food and feed young with it 0.5
Kant, Immanuel 0.5”
― Nicholson Baker, quote from The Mezzanine
“I had stood and stared at the webbing of steel then wished for a hole to climb through. The wires had just unraveled without setting off the klaxon. I remembered thinking with a horrible kind of panic that I had somehow done withcraft, and was convinced I was the blackest kind of evil. Then I realized how ridiculous I was being, and figured it was a coincidental gift from the universe, or something.”
― Penelope Fletcher, quote from Demon Girl
“I feel so completely crazy sometimes. I don't know which way I'm facing. All I can do is just shove all this shit to the side and try to move forward. ”
― Nic Sheff, quote from Tweak: Growing Up On Methamphetamines
“Sometimes I think Life is best summed up as
(a) Awful Bits
and
)b) This That Successfully Distract One from the Awful Bits”
― quote from The FitzOsbornes in Exile
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