Ha Jin quotes:

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Indifference is the strongest contempt.

You strive to have a good heart. But what is a heart? Just a chunk of flesh that a dog can eat.

Life is a journey, and you can't carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.

We ate away, reminiscing about our victories over the enemies from different streets and villages and competing with each other in casting curses. A few golden butterflies and dragonflies were fluttering around us. The afternoon air was warm and clean, and the town below us seemed like a green harbor full of white sails.

English has more flexibility. It's a very plastic, very shapeable, very expressive language. In that sense it feels quite natural.

I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile,

No, It's hard to uproot yourself and really become yourself in another soil, but it's also an opportunity, another kind of growth.

The more you move, the stronger you'll grow, not like a tree that can be killed if you uproot it.

The more you move, the stronger you'll grow....

We can't continue to be like this. Who am I? Your fiancée or your concubine?

When the first emperor wanted to unify the country, one of the major policies was to create one system of written signs. By force, brutal force, he eliminated all the other scripts. One script became the official script. All the others were banned. And those who used other scripts were punished severely. And then the meanings of all the characters, over the centuries, had to be kept uniform as a part of the political apparatus. So from the very beginning the written word was a powerful political tool.

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.