9 quotes
I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read books, even if he had to do so in secret.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
Every nook and cranny of the land came under the all-seeing eye of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had cast its gigantic, fine-meshed net over the whole of China.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
“What happened to her books?”
“They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burnt them in public, right in front of her apartment building.”
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)
Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, of all the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)