Yiyun Li

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing

t is either a dictator or the closest friend I have ever had

What if this emptiness is what keeps me going?

For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line. It reminds me of the boy from years ago who could not stop sending the designs of his dreams in his letters. It reminds me too why I do not want to stop writing. The books one writes—past and present and future—are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life? What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

I am not an autobiographical writer—one cannot be without a solid and explicable self—and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

I did not want the world to know that I was not the real author of my book, even though I had not wanted to be its author in the first place.

Fabienne and I were in this world together, and we had only each other’s hands to hold on to. She had her will. I, my willingness to be led by her will.

the strange title Le Cœur Dans la Poste—The Heart in the Post