Lin Yutang Quotes

I'm out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin' a road other men have gone down
I'm seein' your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

So let me ask you something: how's everybody doing tonight, huh? (audience cheers) Good, well, fuck you! Just trying to make you feel at home.

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138)

Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is freedom. We have only one idea: revolution in our hearts.

From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preserves so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Unbelievable! To hear my father grouped together with Elvis Presley, William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, it's a dream.

Li Yi-an was the greatest poetess of China. Once her husband asked one of his friends to pick out the best lines that he liked from a number of his poems, having, however, concealed in them some pieces by his wife. The friend picked out, to his dismay, only lines from her pen.

The more that you say
The less I know
Wherever you stray
I follow
Begging for you to take my hand
Wreck my plans
That's my man
You know that my train could take you home
Anywhere else is hollow
Begging for you to take my hand
Wreck my plans
That's my man

When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'.

Allah is the Greatest. I'm just the greatest boxer.

Is not just a faded echo of the feeble voice of decadent romanticism but an authentic Indian English utterance exquisitely tuned to the composite to Indian ethos, bringing home to the unbiased reader all the opulence, pageantry and charm of Indian life, and the spenders of Indian scene.

What is a homeland? It is a place that enables people to blossom, and not a place in which people serve the flag. In my poem, Cease-fire with the Mongolians, I say that I am going to make socks out of the flag. My life's work is not on behalf of a flag.

Well, for me the greatest of all marathons is of course the olympic marathon, but second place is Boston.

Did I? That was extremely immodest and foolish of me, my apologies. I would never dare to be so presumptuous. I am only interested in the legacy my father has left behind, and I would like to work towards giving it strength and respect for as long as I live.