Han Suyin
Han Suyin
Han Suyin was the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou. She was a China-born Eurasian, a physician, and author of books in English and French on modern China, novels set in East and Southeast Asia, and autobiographical memoirs which covered the span of modern China. These writings gained her a reputation as an ardent and articulate supporter of the Chinese Communist revolution. She lived in Lausanne until her death...
NationalityChinese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 September 1917
CountryChina
I had to learn that there is more to the human being than material comfort, more than success, more even than national spirit or patriotism. That in any being worthy of being human there is also a demand for justice, for liberty, and that justice needs the evidence of all our lives, liberty is one and indivisible and collective, and no one can talk of justice solely for expediency's sake, nor of liberty while human beings, anywhere else on earth, are still in bondage.
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.
And there is not anything in the world stronger than tenderness.
A family is a burial mound of its own doings and sayings ...
Persecution matures young rebels.
You can only understand the present age when it is past.
Goldfish are flowers ... flowers that move.
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.
We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.
Sadness is so ungrateful.
Moralists have no place in an art gallery.
History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.
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.
Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging ...