“Hope is nice. Fucking useless in this situation, but still nice. You have one sentence before you start bleeding. Make it good.”
“Relationships are complicated."
"Not all of them. For instance, our relationship is very simple. You are annoying; I am annoyed. See? Totally uncomplicated.”
“Mitch thought she looked like an angel might—if the angel had fallen very hard into a very naughty position.”
“All of us hate to be caged, Mitch. For Hyde, and maybe Chastity, it’s necessary. But for the rest of us, it’s a choice.” Eden stalked out, wondering which choice she was making.”
“She really never lies?"
"Never."
"How is that possible?" Mitch leaned back in his chair. "I lie before breakfast. And, if no one else is around, I lie to myself.”
“They played, laughed, and teased until the moment she slid him inside of her. When his world stopped. Everything he'd ever known. Everything he'd ever been disappeared in that one moment.”
“Stop doing that." He motioned at her face. "Don't- Argh! Alright! There's something else. Just turn off the sprinklers.”
“When you visited my office the other day, did I accidentally say I couldn't wait to see you again? Because if so, I left out a word. I meant to say: I can't wait to see you never again.”
“She’d built her entire life around the idea that the only thing she could control was herself—her actions, her words. And, if she did the right thing, other people would somehow treat her with the same respect. But it wasn’t true, now, was it? Her decency made no difference at all in anyone’s life but hers.”
“She was nice, and, while nice people often end up last, they don’t inspire violence in others.”
“What do you know?”
“Almost everything. That almost part can be a real kick in the teeth sometimes.”
“What do you want, then?”
“What I can’t have.” Wit turned to him, eyes solemn. “Same as everyone else, Kaladin Stormblessed.”
“You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything...it was not a morbid thought, just the world as it existed. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't.”
“I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.
Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.
I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.
I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?
Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.”
“I love you." she whispered into the rough wool of his sweater.”
“I know there's something here. I know you want more. Tell me...and it's yours.”
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