Cheng Yu Tung Quotes

Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent. ~ Mao Tse-tung

We sit together and wait. For the time to pass. For the memories to fade. For the waiting to be over ~ Kai Cheng Thom

You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you
might even forget yourself. ~ Charles Yu

When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.
Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self. He steps out of a time machine, introduces himself as Charles Yu. What else am I supposed to do? I kill him. I kill my own future. ~ Charles Yu

[Li Ch'uan cites the case of Fu Chien, prince of Ch'in, who in 383 A.D. marched with a vast army against the Chin Emperor. When warned not to despise an enemy who could command the services of such men as Hsieh An and Huan Ch'ung, he boastfully replied: "I have the population of eight provinces at my back, infantry and horsemen to the number of one million; why, they could dam up the Yangtsze River itself by merely throwing their whips into the stream. What danger have I to fear?" Nevertheless, his forces were soon after disastrously routed at the Fei River, and he was obliged to beat a hasty retreat.] If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. [Chang Yu said: "Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive." He adds: "Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack." It would be hard to find a better epitome of the root-principle of war.] ~ Sun Tzu

People do evil simply because they do not know. ~ Cheng Yi

I must not only keep alive, but I must be as strong as granite, so that no matter how much I was knocked about, I could remain unbroken. ~ Nien Cheng

But when Polo travelled through the South Caucasus in the thirteenth century, he visited Silk Road territories long since vanished or metamorphosed, such as Lesser and Greater Hermenia, Turcomania, Georgiana, and Zorzania. 'Names are only the guests of reality,' the Chinese sage Hsu Yu noted in 2300 BCE, suggesting that borders are little more than collective myths--fictions that a certain number of people, for a certain period of time, believe are fact. ~ Kate Harris

Yu come face to face with love, and before the sun sets you've become someone you didn't used to be...

It's the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can't fly and she don't ever need to touch the ground. ~ Jonathan Hickman

I guess I felt like the reason I was so hurt afterward was because I'd gotten carried away, started thinking too far ahead of myself. And all the pain and suffering were because I'd built up my expectations, and after that I learned my lesson. If I don't expect anything, then nothing can hurt me. ~ Jack Cheng

When I drink tea I am conscious of peace. The cool breath of heaven rises in my sleeves, and blows my cares away. ~ Lo Tung

Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares. ~ Charles Yu

Giving up meant caving to the pressure of an external force, whereas quitting was an exercise of internal will. ~ Jack Cheng

...if you're only brave when you're happy then it's not bravery ~ Jack Cheng

He raised his arm to strike me. At that very moment, [my daughter] Meiping's cat, Fluffy, came through the kitchen door, jumped on the man's leg from behind, and sank his teeth into the flesh of the man's calf. ~ Nien Cheng

I'm here to talk about the men in your life. To talk about the men in my life. I like the dress, by the way. Very boho chic or whatever. I was on my way home, and I wanted to find out if you had a good time at the toga party and also make sure that our plans for Zimbabwe were still on. I see you tried to claw your own eye out; it's edgy. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life. ~ Charles Yu

Its liquor is like the sweetest dew from Heaven. ~ Lu Yu

The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people. ~ Mao Tse-tung

In England, we have a curious institution called the Church of England. Its strength has always been in the fact that on any moral or political issue it can produce such a wide divergence of opinion that nobody
from the Pope to Mao Tse-tung
can say with any confidence that he is not an Anglican. Its weaknesses are that nobody pays much attention to it and very few people attend its functions. ~ Auberon Waugh

Going back to the basis, the phrase 'Fight Like A Girl', and we've all heard that growing up. And by that they mean that you're some kind of weakling and have no skills as a male. It's said to little boys when they can't fight yet, and it ridicules us. By the time we were born, the most of us hear things which program you to accept and know that you are less than your male counter part. It comes apparent in the way you're paid for your job, it comes apparent when yóu are not allowed to go outside after a certain hour because you stand a good chance of getting raped while no one says that to your boyfriend. While women, anywhere, live in some kind of fear, there is no equality and that is mathematically impossible. We cannot see that change or solved in our lifetimes, but we have to do everything that we can. We should remind ourselves that we are fifty-one percent. Everyone should know that fighting like a girl is a positive thing and that there is not inherently anything wrong with us by the fact that we are born like ladies. That is a beautiful thing that we should never be put down because of. Being compared to a woman should only make a man feel stronger. It should be a compliment. In this world we're creating it actually is.

I remember this one guy who came to our show in Texas or something and he had painted his shirt "real men fight like a girl", and I cried, because he was going away in the army next day. He bought my book because he wanted something he co ~ Emilie Autumn

China during the Mao era was a poor country, but it had a strong public health network that provided free immunizations to its citizens. That was where I came in. In those days there were no disposable needles and syringes; we had to reuse ours again and again. Sterilization too was primitive: The needles and syringes would be washed, wrapped separately in gauze, and placed in aluminum lunch boxes laid in a huge wok on top of a briquette stove. Water was added to the wok, and the needles and syringes were then steamed for two hours, as you would steam buns.

On my first day of giving injections I went to a factory. The workers rolled up their sleeves and waited in line, baring their arms to me one after another – and offering up a tiny piece of red flesh, too. Because the needles had been used multiple times, almost every one of them had a barbed tip. You could stick a needle into someone's arm easily enough, but when you extracted it, you would pull out a tiny piece of flesh along with it. For the workers the pain was bearable, although they would grit their teeth or perhaps let out a groan or two. I paid them no mind, for the workers had had to put up with barbed needles year after year and should be used to it by now, I thought. But the next day, when I went to a kindergarten to give shot to children from the ages of three through six, it was a difference story. Every last one of them burst out weeping and wailing. Because their skin was so tender, the needles wo ~ Yu Hua

Use the mind to direct the chi and the chi to mobilise the body. ~ Cheng Man-ch'ing

My power, if you can call it that, and I don't think you can, is that I am able to take about two gallons of water from the moisture in the air and shoot it in a stream or a gentle mist. Or a ball. Which is useful for water-balloon fights, but not all that helpful when trying to stop Carnage and Mayhem from robbing a bank. ~ Charles Yu

If one concentrates on one thing and does not get away from it ... he will possess strong, moving power. ~ Cheng Yi

there are no words in your mouth
but there's a pen in your head
you want to tell the truth
but you told stories instead ~ Kai Cheng Thom

Sometimes to be somebody else, you have to be nobody first ~ Kai Cheng Thom

It's good for you to cry sometimes. Even if there isn't a reason. ~ Kai Cheng Thom

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters.
Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be. ~ Charles Yu

Am I supposed to want you this much?
Nadia. You are supposed to have me anytime, anywhere, any way you wish. ~ Eileen Wilks

The clouds above us join and separate,
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating? ~ Lu Yu

The small things are the fuses to get the bigger things to explode. ~ Roseanne Cheng

You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry. ~ Charles Yu

Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog. ~ Charles Yu

Historical experience is written in iron and blood. ~ Mao Tse-tung

Failure is easy to measure. Failure is an event.Harder to measure is insignificance. A nonevent. Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you're not looking, it's there, at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it's the lack of all that. One day, when you are looking, it's not looking, no one is. You lie in your bed and realize that if you don't get out of bed and into the world today, it is very likely no one will even notice. ~ Charles Yu

What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don't I ever learn? Why don't I ever do anything different? ~ Charles Yu

If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it. narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19 ~ Charles Yu

Is language all about desire? Is desire all about loss? Would we ever need to say anything if we never lost anything? Is everything we ever say just another way to express: I will lose this, I will lose all of this. I will lose you? ~ Charles Yu

Books are like this magical window that you can open no matter where you are and you fall into a different place that´s better than the one you´re trapped in. ~ Kai Cheng Thom

Thinking about more and more abstract concepts is a bit like the high jump. You have to get yourself over a progressively higher and higher bar, and if nobody explains how to do it, you will keep knocking the bar off and want to give up. ~ Eugenia Cheng

All of her heart, a meaningless phrase, but correct and precise, too. She used her heart to love him, not her head, and not her words and not her thoughts or ideas or feelings or any other vehicle or object or device people use to deliver love or love-like things. ~ Charles Yu

When you point a finger at the moon to indicate the moon, instead of looking at the moon,the stupid ones look at your finger. ~ Mao Tse-tung

Sometimes the clouds inside my head get big and gray and swirly and then I hurricane through my eyes. ~ Jack Cheng