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“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.”

— Dai Sijie Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000)

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More quotes by Dai Sijie

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)

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Dai Sijie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.