“La libertad no es un derecho del hombre que concede el cielo, y la libertad de soñar tampoco se adquiere desde el nacimiento: es una capacidad que hay que preservar, una conciencia, sobre todo porque las pesadillas no paran de perturbarla.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“Prior to that I had written many works but I was unable to present them for publication, in fact I had burned them all.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“he was as if a “reborn” human being, a “fundamentalist” as a human being.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“I decided that I did not want to follow any of these ideologies or trends, because these also exerted a kind of pressure, and obstructed absolute creative freedom.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“I did not think about what sort of people might read it. In fact, I was writing it for myself.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“Another issue was language, the problem of expressing these themes in language and the problem of how much one can articulate in language.”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
Gao Xingjian
Born place: in Taizhou, Jiangsu, China
Born date January 4, 1940
See more on GoodReads
“Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals.”
― Edmund Morris, quote from The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
“He had one of those typical piece of shit days. The grind always. At least this time he had the guys to stay away from the bar and not drive home to the wife and kid drunk. He got home and immediately everything pissed him off. Sometimes the way his wife looked at him made him want to kill himself. The way she all of a sudden appeared like a total stranger. The vacancy in her eyes, it was bad. He took his son's favourite plastic mug, the one with the picture of Magic Johnson, and threw it into the trash. He felt better but not much.”
― Henry Rollins, quote from Eye Scream
“She is not for you. She is a wild one--wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi".”
― Bernard Malamud, quote from The Magic Barrel
“DNA was the chemical material on which hereditary information was recorded, while a gene was one unit of that nearly infinite amount of hereditary information.”
― Kōji Suzuki, quote from Spiral
“The Newtonian God—the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew—died a long time ago. This is what Nietzsche meant and this is the God who is being observed.”
― Marshall McLuhan, quote from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects
The Faerie Queene
A Rose for Emily and...
The Secret Life of W...
A Separate Reality
Eat Prey Love
The Walking Dead, Vo...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.
