Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth Quotes

“People always say it's harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite—a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Never look back to the past, never regret, even if there is emptiness ahead.' But I couldn't help it. Sometimes I would rather look back if it meant that I could feel something in my heart, even something sad. Sadness was better than emptiness.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit had happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before out births, for instance and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananmen Square student demonstration. Anyway, Xiaolin was one year younger than me, so I assumed we were from the same generation.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Hot coffee is like a warm-blooded man. They both give you the courage to face a new day.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Yours is the face of a post-modern woman.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“If I'm sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I'd cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn't stand it and I'd swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a clidd. So, I come here instead where there's so much water already I can weep in peace.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“They think there are only two kinds of young women in China: good girls or prostitutes.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“My youth began when I was 21. At least, that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life - some of them might possibly be for me.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“We were like family - family members always hurt each other. And Ben was not my family, he lived for himself. A Western body when Ben and I slept together, he could forget all about the love that was lying next to him in the dark. I felt he didn't need much warmth from anybody. His own 37.2º C were sufficient for him. His spirit slept alone.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I felt an urge to conquer this new village.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Heavenly Bastard in the Sky”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, these cockroaches were sadomasochists, looking for the most painful way to die. Once I swallowed one absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatised, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Everything around me was changing so fast—my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere. Okay, so I was getting lots of work, but it was all the same. Woman Waiting on the Platform, Lady in Waiting, Bored Waitress. I was only in my twenties, but I felt seventy. I had to do something, ask my brain to start working, so I could match this fast-moving city.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Humans need cages around their bodies – wombs, houses, coffins.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Then he asked my age, and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiaolin and I knew how old the other was, we knew exactly what big shit happened in our lives. The introduction of the One Child Policy shortly before our births, for instance, and the fact that, in 1985, two pandas were sent to the USA as a national gift and we had to sing a tearful panda song at school. 1989 was the Tiananment Square student demonstration.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I couldn't believe a mother and her daughter could have so much to say to each other. In my family, no one talked. In my family, people lived like insects, like worms, like slugs hanging on the back door of the house.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“In all my time in Beijing, I’d never managed to have a female friend. It seemed every woman in this city was busy either with her kids or with her mortgage.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I became a person who was very good at hiding her emotions. Maybe that was why people thought I was heartless. Apparently my face often had a blank expression. Huizi, my most intellectual friend, would say, “Fenfang, yours is the face of a post-modern woman.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Don’t worry, she deserved it anyway. She’s no good, that girl. Much too individualistic.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“Each leaf had shuddered in the wind on any given yesterday. Each cloud drifting overhead had blown across those skies the year before. Nothing had changed, and nothing could change. The world felt frozen in front of me, like a family photo trapped in a frame. This landscape had imprisoned me since I was born.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“When I left my village, it was like I took a step with my right foot and, by the time my left foot came to join it, four years had passed.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“You could walk from North Tai Ping Zhuang over to the North Entrance of He Ping Street, and you may as well have smoked your way through two packs of Camels. You smoked the taxi driver’s smoke as he spun sharply around a corner, you smoked the local party leader’s smoke as he tried to establish order at a meeting, you smoked your boyfriend’s smoke whether he loved you or not. Chinese-made cigarettes, foreign imports, dodgy rip-offs. The city was in a permanent fog.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“I started to watch nameless men and women in the street. We were alike: none of us heroes, just ordinary people—extras—drifting through messy streets in a vast, messy Beijing. One morning, I went for a walk along the rubble-filled roads near my building. The area was being completely reconstructed. Three or four giant trucks had just arrived to start their demolition. Old buildings were going. Entire streets were going. In just one night all the food stalls had disappeared, along with the men from the countryside who used to run them.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“He orders a batch of handmade tiedyed shirts from Guizhou province and takes them to a graduate student at the Central Authority Fine Arts School to find out what to charge. The graduate student swings his long hair back and forth and tells Hao An these shirts are not authentic enough, not tribal enough. No way are young Beijingers going to be interested in them: there’s no art, no attitude. “What should I do now then?” asks Hao An. The graduate student tells him to head to the bars in Sanlitun and sell them to drunken foreigners and pretentious businessmen with art collections.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“People always say it’s harder to heal a wounded heart than a wounded body. Bullshit. It’s exactly the opposite—a wounded body takes much longer to heal. A wounded heart is nothing but ashes of memories. But the body is everything. The body is blood and veins and cells and nerves. A wounded body is when, after leaving a man you’ve lived with for three years, you curl up on your side of the bed as if there’s still somebody beside you. That is a wounded body: a body that feels connected to someone who is no longer there.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

“This was Beijing. A city that never showed its gentle side. You’d die if you didn’t fight with it, and there was no end to the fight. Beijing was a city for Sisyphus—you could push and push and push, but ultimately that stone was bound to roll back on you.”
― Xiaolu Guo, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth