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We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.

— 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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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.