The Devil Of Nanking Quotes
"Sometimes you have to really make an effort. Even when you’re tired and hungry and you find yourself somewhere completely strange."
"Everyone does this the first time they meet me, and the truth is, no matter how much you pretend, you never really get used to being stared at."
"I’m not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person’s gaze."
"You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough."
"Few have a concept of when Chinese medicine first came to Japan, but you can even look at the Tang era and see evidence of its existence here."
"What I’m interested in is just how much of all this came with Jian Zhen, and how much was brought back to Japan by the troops in 1945."
"Sometimes you have to go a long way to prove things. Even if it turns out that you’re only proving things to yourself."
"The key to a happy and balanced life is learning to control [impulses]."
"Even an ugly toad dreams of eating a beautiful swan."
"Can you not see how this sort of behaviour has held our nation back?"
"There was nothing, absolutely nothing, lovely about tortured feet."
"To cut your nails after dark will certainly bring demons to the house."
"Death and destruction, the last things that should be on our minds."
"She loves her outfits so much: every night it was something different."
"Don't say nothing about nothing. There are good reason people afraid of him."
"To conceal the past is not such a rare trick."
"It’s funny how people can plant ideas in your head."
"When you know you’re right about something, the important thing is to keep going."
"We must make our buildings look as if they are uninhabited."
"To doubt the Kuomintang will always look to us, searching for faith in our eyes."
"She says she has known from the moment she stepped from the train a year ago that she was trapped here."
"Imagine that this calm little bird is the past."
"It’s true – now it’s really going to happen. The earth, our soil. The Japanese are going to harm the earth – they’re going to destroy the dragon lines in the ground and—"
"‘Hush, now. There is no such thing as a dragon line—"
"No! Not only a bird – a golden pheasant! We’re all going to die."
"But her taunts had me leaping in defence of a position that I am quite unsure of."
"It comforted me. When I was a boy I would sit on the floor of the kitchen and watch my mother drop chickens into boiling water to soften the feathers."
"Chiang Kai-shek, I thought dully, wants China to look forward. But is it so simple for a nation to rip the history from inside its heart?"
"Now in the bathroom in Takadanobaba, I rinsed out the flannel and looked thoughtfully at my reflection, a thin-limbed spectre squatting on the little rubber stool."
"Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and say: ‘This is not something I can expect in my life.’ And if you say it enough times, it’s surprising – after a while it doesn’t even feel that horrible any more."
"We already know what will happen? Maybe she is right. Maybe all truths are in us at birth."
"It can’t be much longer before peace is restored. There are radio reports of attempts to set up a Self-governing Committee for the city."
"The nurse’s soft footfalls moving down the stairs. I was sure I could hear padlocks rattling, iron doors creaking open. She was going to get Fuyuki’s medicine."
"‘You forget, I can tell when you’re lying.’ He looked at my face, then at my hair and my neck, as if they had just asked him a complex question."
"At last I can write. At last I have some peace."
"I pinned my refugee certificate to my jacket and slipped out into the alleyway, dragged onwards by the smell."
"‘It could be the food they stole from us,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ve got the gall to cook it.’"
"Haven’t you – haven’t you got one of these, old man?"
"Sometimes I wonder who is the foolish one in my marriage."
"I sniffed the air. That incredible tantalizing smell seemed stronger."
"‘Come out,’ we hissed into the houses. ‘Show us – show us what you are cooking.’"
"I’m not so hungry any more, old man. I’m not."
"What a mistake we’ve made. What a terrible mistake."
"‘You don’t need to be.’ He kissed my neck, licking me with the flat of his tongue, just below my ear, waiting a moment for me to soften and absorb him."
"You and me are – we’re the same. Did you know that?"
"I am glad, because if I had opened my mouth to reply I might have said these words: Maybe not now, maybe not tonight, but soon the end will come."
"‘I find this attitude most odd, yes, most odd. I understood you were "desperate" to see my film.’"
"I have invested an enormous amount of time in you and now you’ve changed your mind."
"This is what we’ve been moving towards all along, isn’t it? It’s what pulled us together."
"It won’t even be a big deal. Because you and me are – we’re the same. Did you know that?"
"They are slaughtering civilians. There were no women in that crowd, true, but even that is a poor relief. No women."
"You didn’t really expect anything else, did you? Now, lie down. Relax."
"I’ve been patient but you’re . . . It’s going on for ever. It’s not funny any more."
"They take coal trucks from Xiaguan and trawl the villages for women."
"‘I saw it. They were strung together.’ He jabbed a finger into the soft flesh behind his collarbone. ‘They put a wire through here and strung them together, like – like a necklace. A necklace of people.’"
"‘Fat that taste bad. Not normal. And bones.’ Her voice was almost inaudible now. She was sitting forward, her eyes gleaming at me. ‘Long bones. Too long for pig, too thin for cow.’"
"She’s giving me serious ideas, weirdo. Something you’re really going to love."
"You can always tell when you’re getting close to the truth – it’s as if the air starts to tingle."
"What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare."
"Ignorance is not the same as insanity. And it never has been."
"There are traces of her on the front of my greatcoat and under my nails."
"Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else."
"You think that it won’t ever really get too serious – that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far."
"History will fail, and there will be no definitive Nanking invasion."
"Somewhere, in one of the streets not far away, something was burning."
"Earlier we’d filled our stomach with buckwheat noodles, but there had been no protein in the meal."
"I want to say that I love you, I want to talk to you the way men talk to their wives in Europe."
"The smell that had been haunting me for days."
"The thoughts and images were getting jumbled and coming out in a strange order."
"The Nurse went to everybody’s house last night."
"The only person in the club who wasn’t shocked when the bird hit."
"We’ve both got exactly what the other needs."
"The uncanny sensation that some awful revelation was crouched just out of view."
"The sky above the houses opposite was red: snarling flames leaping twenty and thirty feet into the air."
"I knew I would always be afraid of what I am eating."
"Every step is a fight with the seductive lethargy of cold."
"Years and years from now I will recall that sound. I’ll dream about it, I’ll hear it in the cold white spaces of my future dreams."
"Death would have been easy when compared with what happened next."
"The past is an explosive, and once its splinters are in you they will always, always work their way to the surface."
"On the outside I am a professor of sociology. On the inside I work only to find my daughter."
"The past is not just a thing that is over. It's also the future that we're walking into."
"Our children would hold us. Just like Shi Chongming I was going to be eternally connected to my dead baby girl."
"He dragged with him a line... a line from here, from this place to eternity. A line that could never be cut or shaken off."
"It's always been clear to me that the human heart turns itself inside out to belong, it reaches and strains for the first and nearest warmth."