“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”

“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...”

“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.”

“Values aren't buses... They're not supposed to get you anywhere. They're supposed to define who you are.”

“Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.”

“We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often that we care to remember. What else is there to ...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living ins...”

“Does truth have a moral?”

“I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”