Plateful Chinese Quotes

Like most actors, I've always been grateful for Chinese restaurants; they were often the only places that stayed open late enough for performers to get hot food after the show. ~ Ginger Rogers

I think one of the problems when we discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict is people talk too much in terms of, 'What's your preference?,' like politics is a Chinese menu - I'll take one from column A and two from column B. That's not what politics is about. ~ Norman Finkelstein

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks? ~ George Carlin

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality. ~ Azar Nafisi

We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can't escape what we are ... obedient chinese daughters. ~ Lisa See

The Beijing Olympics were an exercise in Chinese soft power. Americans have the 'Voice of America' and the Fulbright scholarships. But, the fact is, in fact, that probably Hollywood and MTV and McDonalds have done more for American soft power around the world than any specifically government activity. ~ Shashi Tharoor

If your strength is small, don't carry heavy burdens. If your words are worthless, don't give advice." Chinese proverb ~ Nana Awere Damoah

I was a hyperactive kid, and it took awhile for me to find the right teacher. My master was a Shaolin kung fu teacher, but he also taught tai chi, Chinese medicine, brush painting - he was adept at all facets of Chinese culture. ~ Daniel Wu

It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27 ~ Andrew Coe

Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. ~ Henry Kissinger

I'm online, therefore I am. ~ Stewart Lee Beck

The Chinese used the symbol of tai chi, the undifferentiated reality - no separation, no left and right. ~ Frederick Lenz

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic. ~ Evan Osnos

Take the most dangerous power in the South China Sea, China. While the century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers "is a period etched in acid on the pages of Chinese student textbooks today, ~ Robert D. Kaplan

I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one. ~ Paul Simon

I just really, really love food, so I don't have a favourite. But if I had to pick one to eat every day, it would be Italian. But I also love Chinese and Japanese food. ~ Daniel Humm

Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles. ~ Janet M. Tavakoli

To stand on a mountain top, you must first create the mountain. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

I personally think that Hollywood agencies ought to play a much better role in the development of Chinese films. Otherwise they're missing out on a lot of opportunities. ~ Bruno Zheng Wu

A Chinese proverb says, "Those who drink the water must remember those who dug the well." Gratitude is one of the most attractive of all personal attributes; ~ John C. Maxwell

soldiers on the banks of the canal, they looked carefully to see whether they were Japanese or Chinese so they'd know which pass to pull out. ~ Katherine Paterson

It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence. ~ Naomi Klein

It is the experience of those who have had to do with the various peoples of the Far East that it is easier to understand the Korean and get close to him than it is to understand either the Japanese or the Chinese. ~ Homer B. Hulbert

Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation. ~ John McWhorter

If we don't do it, somebody else will. The Chinese, the Europeans and the Japanese all have the goal of going to the moon. Certainly we don't want to wake up and see that they have a base there before we do. ~ Bart Gordon

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

You see, calling things by their proper names is the beginning of wisdom. That's a Chinese proverb and they invented writing. The wisdom, in case you're wondering, is that when you get names right, you narrow the gap between you and the thing. ~ Zia Haider Rahman

Taoism was an active power during the Shin dynasty, that epoch of Chinese unification from which we derive the name China. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as oportunity. ~ Adeline Yen Mah

If I were to limit myself to the opportunities that were presented playing only Chinese-American parts, I would be virtually without a career. ~ BD Wong

The crisis of democracy in the West is not the result of falling in love with another system. In Europe and America people who are disillusioned with democracy do not dream about the Chinese model or any other form of authoritarian rule. They do not dream about government that controls Internet and puts in prison those daring to disagree. ~ Ivan Krastev

The Chinese view the state, not just as an intimate member of the family ... but as the head of the family. ~ Martin Jacques

Approaching the Start of Civil Exams

Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar
approaching the start of civil exams,
my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion
with books on syntax and poetic style.

All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains
and sweet white blossoms of mountain apples
that grew in the valleys of my province.

But I had been gone over six years
busy with studies in the Heavenly City
empty and thin despite my work.

I showed my verses to an older poet
who told me a truth I longed to believe:
all knowledge is futile and barren
which does not open the love of your friends. ~ Jim Chapson

The hackaneers, like the captains of pirate crews, had needed skilled men and women, and someone like Lang was in short supply. He had told his hackaneer captain which family members of the Chinese Politburo to target, to steal the pictures of their mistresses and investment records, to rob and blackmail and extort until the crew's coffers had swelled with loot. Then ~ August Cole

The trouble with you," Parvathi said with a wisdom beyond her years, "Is that you don't know who you want to be. Girl or boy. Chinese or Malay."

"Ya-lah you!" Fatima said. "No wonder the kids in your school call you OCBC."

There was a bank in Singapore called the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, or OCBC in short. So some cruel kid in school played on the initials of the bank to make fun of Peranakans.

They jeered, "Orang Cina Bukan Cina." The words translated as Chinese person, not Chinese. ~ Josephine Chia

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we - and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians - have imagined. ~ Paul A. Cohen

But in the end, he's just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant. ~ Wes Anderson

My position at the Palace is our one opportunity. Have confidence in my destiny. Do not weep. ~ Shan Sa

When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc. ~ Maya Deren

Can a president who's presided over, and possibly encouraged, Chinese-style surveillance of The Land of the Free honestly expect to serve out his full term? ~ Damian Thompson

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them. ~ Ma Jian

In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same
Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence. ~ Stephen Levine

Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys. ~ Justin Ker

At the circus, a careless mother may let her child take part in the experiments of a Chinese magician. He puts him in a box. He opens the box; it's empty. He closes it again. He opens it; the child reappears and goes back to his seat. Now it is no longer the same child. Nobody doubts it. ~ Jean Cocteau

I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader's emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again - through my own translations from a selection of popular Chinese novel sand poems - some of the imagined worlds in which Chinese have passed their daily reality during the last two hundred years. I have tried to convey something of what it felt like to be a Chinese, living in Chinese society, in different settings of status, age, and gender, and how this has changed over time. For reasons of method, I have looked at a small number of organically coherent emotional spaces, contained in individual works or parts of works, and considered them in detail. ... It would be pretending to more wisdom than I have to claim that the selection I have made is the result of a rigorous intellectual winnowing process from a harvest of widespread reading in late-imperial and modern Chinese literature. Honesty compels the admission that it is more the outcome of chance, serendipity, and whatever happened to catch my imagination, for reasons that I am probably in no position to do more than guess at. ... In so far as there has been a guiding principle behind my choices it has been the desire to show as much as the constraints of space allow of the contrasts among those in different social position, different periods, and different ideologies. ~ Mark Elvin

The sensation of the ocean bearing my weight was the most carefree lightness I'd ever experienced. When we were halfway across the strait, the sound of an engine approached from a distance - it was probably the police coast guard. We quickly ducked under the surface of the water, exposing only the tips of our trunks so we could breathe. ~ Xi Ni Er

All the rest of the world uses the word electricity. They've borrowed the word from English. But we Chinese have our own word for it! ~ Mao Zedong