“I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people's beginnings and ends.”

“I don't know where I am going, I just know I had to leave. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”

“Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist r...”

“When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.”

“To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expressi...”

“Beauty can make a woman rich, but if she relies solely on her looks to get by, she'll always remain under a man's thumb.”

“I do not know where to go, but I have been on the road.”

“While she was in transit, being unattached was exhilarating, but the moment she stopped, so did the high.”

“The natural tenderness and delicacy of our constitution, added to the many dangers we are subject to from your sex, renders it almost impossible for a single lady to travel without injury to her ch...”