“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
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“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
“As soon as I get a ship that can take to the open seas, I'm going to find and rescue and - if there's any worth in me - marry the only woman in whom I can see both a body and a face, and with whom I need not resign one or the other of my own.”
― Tim Powers, quote from On Stranger Tides
“Most of us, I suppose, have had at one time or another the impulse to leave behind our daily routines and responsibilities and seek out, temporarily, a new life.”
― Alice Steinbach, quote from Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman
“But he was sometimes willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige. Occasionally, by special arrangement, he would take at greatly reduced fees some boy who seemed likely to win scholarships and thus bring credit on the school. It was on these terms that I was at Crossgates myself: otherwise my parents could not have afforded to send me to so expensive a school.”
― George Orwell, quote from A Collection of Essays
“This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.”
― Doris Lessing, quote from Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
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Dork Diaries Book 4:...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.
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