“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.”

“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.”

“How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before”

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.”

“Immer wieder behauptete Unwahrheiten werden nicht zu Wahrheiten, sondern, was schlimmer ist, zu Gewohnheiten.”