“If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, ...”

“The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.”

“I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?”

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”

“Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one...”

“The young man murmured in his sleep and said, Dear Sparrow, and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.”

“We all have the same root, and are connected...To tap into this connectedness we must go within.”

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

“I'd rather be on the ground than underTo feel the heavy rain and the thunder.”