Han Suyin Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

Everything changes, including the stars. I really can't hate [for] more than 5 or 10 years. Wouldn't it be terrible to be always burdened with those primary emotions you had at one time?

Han Suyin
Love from one being to another can only be that two solitudes come nearer, recognize and protect and comfort each other.

Han Suyin
In Chungking's summer, people could not sleep. They strolled in the night until exhaustion pushed them into stupor — a stupor abridged by the ferocious return of the despotic sun at dawn, exploding out of the river and laying its slaughtering rays upon all.

Han Suyin
Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.

Han Suyin
Vermer tried a pass at me, after giving me lunch one day, and later had tall tales to tell, but that is not uncommon among inferior men. He was only one of a long series of males, who for one reason or another, to boost their own ego, find it satisfying to boast of what they have not achieved.

Han Suyin
No single crisis shapes a generation; but a succession of events, each one bringing its shaping blows to bear.

Han Suyin
'Your laws are ineffective,' Wen declared. 'Why? Because no system of control will work as long as most of those administering the law against an evil have more than a finger dipped into it themselves.'

Han Suyin
The fact is that some men, not all, felt that they could go back to the good old days of treating women badly. Also, the fact is that we still have the old Confucian ideas coming back that a woman's life is not worth a man's life.

Han Suyin
Instead of remaining torn and frayed, as so many other people, I come together and now both my worlds have come together. To be quite honest, I was not very happy in a world where China and the West were at odds.

Han Suyin
Love can never explain the loved one, my dear. It is the essence of wild unreason.

Han Suyin
The rice bowl is to me the most valid reason in the world for doing anything. A piece of one's soul to the multitudes in return for rice and wine does not seem to me a sacrilege.

Han Suyin
I, like Shenfu, do not want anything else; it would be adding feet to a snake.

Han Suyin
I think it was fun to be castigated as an agent of the CIA in China at the same time I was blacklisted in America. I enjoyed it immensely and I enjoy also the controversy of people who ascribe to me motives I never had.

Han Suyin
Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

Han Suyin
Rosalie had to wait many years till at last she realized that her ugliness was only in the eye of the beholder, Mama, and that actually she too was good-looking.

Han Suyin
With some people there is such a thing as the habit of betrayal.

Han Suyin
And though we waited another three weeks, the end was sure, and we did what we had to do. Fate had spread her nets and lighted her lamps, and into her snare we went, our eyes wide open, like the fish of Deep Water Bay.

Han Suyin
Many events seem to happen twice to me; even trifles, unimportant-seeming, recur, as if I were destined to live them again, time reconquered, but with added knowledge and a different outcome.

Han Suyin
I'm a person who changes, who adapts. It's because of my avidity for learning. If tomorrow you prove to me something new, I'll be quite willing to overturn my ideas because ideas are made to be overturned.

Han Suyin
It is the illusion of all lovers to think themselves unique and their words immortal.

Han Suyin
And there is not anything in the world stronger than tenderness.

Han Suyin
A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings.

Han Suyin
All humans are frightened of their own solitude. Yet only in solitude can man learn to know himself, learn to handle his own eternity of aloneness.

Han Suyin
This is Malaya. Everything takes a long, a very long time, in Malaya. Things get done, occasionally, but more often they don't, and the more in a hurry you are, the quicker you break down.

Han Suyin