Bridge Of Birds Quotes
"It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the chewing sounds of ravenous silkworms are enough to waken hibernating bears."
"My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character."
"Pawnbroker Fang wasn't guessing at all. There was always some smooth shiny object lying on top of his desk... it was used as a mirror that would reflect the eyes of the victim."
"The happiest time of all for the team of Ma and Fang was our annual silk harvest, because silkworm eggs could only be purchased with money and they had all the money."
"My father died when I was eight. A year later my mother followed him to the Yellow Springs Beneath the Earth, and since then I have lived with Uncle Nung and Auntie Hua in the village of Ku-fu."
"The abbot used to say that the emotional health of a village depended upon having a man whom everyone loved to hate, and Heaven had blessed us with two of them."
"I shall clasp my hands together and bow to the corners of the world."
"They made sure that there would be no straight roads or rivers that might draw good influences away."
"I have no idea whether or not it was premonition, but the image remained with me throughout our journey back to Ku-fu."
"First tell me how a plague can learn how to count!"
"Punishment produces force, force produces strength, strength produces awe, awe produces virtue; thus virtue has its origin in punishment."
"Only one treatment is effective, and this will succeed only if the physician has access to the rarest and mightiest of all healing agents, the Great Root of Power."
"The bride of my beloved great-grandson is dead!"
"I have often heard of porcupine poisoning, but I confess that I have never seen it."
"His fingers actually entered her body, for her smooth and supple skin had become soft jelly from which green and yellow corruption oozed."
"Ten pins. If it will hold ten pins! Seven... eight... nine... ten... eleven... twelve... thirteen... fourteen... fifteen... sixteen... seventeen..."
"You and I have just become the two wealthiest men in all China."
"Every single one of them instantly started playing the Hopping Hide and Seek Game, and every single one of them recited a nonsense rhyme that children from this village had first heard many centuries ago at Dragon's Pillow."
"Well, beauty is a ridiculously overrated commodity."
"Nothing on the face of this earth — and I do mean nothing — is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real."
"If it's all right with you, I'd rather worry about real heads splashing into real basins filled with real blood."
"I have decided to ask the Yama Kings to let me be reborn as a three-toed sloth."
"I would hate to think how many corpses this stuff cost."
"I had feared that I would never have the opportunity of thanking my benefactors in person!"
"Nothing but monstrous grinding teeth could have shredded bones like that."
"The most that I dare ask of the Yama Kings is that I may be reborn as a beautiful flower, so that sometime, somewhere, a dancing girl might choose to pluck me and wear me in her hair."
"Immortality is only for the gods; I wonder how they can stand it."
"Why does everyone ask for immortality? I have so many other secrets to sell. Beautiful secrets, beastly secrets, happy secrets, horrible secrets, lovely secrets, lunatic secrets, laughing secrets, loathsome secrets..."
"A sage, I perceive, with a slight flaw in his character."
"I can teach you how to turn your friends into flowers and your enemies into cockroaches."
"The most wonderful wife in the world. Her name was Chiang-chao, and we were very poor, but she could make the most delicious meals from a handful of rice and the herbs that she picked in the woods."
"It is simply a matter of finding the purest ingredients, because I already have an infallible formula."
"We are being led toward something, and I strongly suspect that Henpecked Ho has also supplied the question that we must ask before we continue the quest."
"When history crumbles into dust, the events of history are sometimes preserved in the form of myth or fable."
"You should see what that boy did to the Great River of Stars! Every hospital in Heaven will be filled with broken stars for at least six months, and you don't know what misery is until you try to bandage a broken star!"
"Immortality is a meaningless word unless invulnerability goes with it."
"Master Li, forgive my impertinence, but if the pursuit of wisdom leads to the Old Man of the Mountain I cannot help but think that men would be better off if they stayed stupid."
"There is more than one kind of wisdom. There is wisdom to take, and there is wisdom to give."
"Mysteries cease to be mysteries when they are viewed from the proper angle."
"You would goad me into indiscretion, my friend with the flaw in his character?"
"Let the chicken go ahead and get killed. He couldn't tell a turd from a turnip."
"Ever since we held hands and recited the Orphan's Song, I knew that you would fall in love with Lotus Cloud."