Bookish quotation 1 for deckchair competition

Yiyun Li

"I want to interfere with history, making things up at will, adding layers to legend... The scenes always move me, as they are the central scenes of a hero's story. I want the story to be about bravery. But always I am stopped."

(excerpted from "What has that to do with me?", first appeared in the Gettysburg Review, vol. 16 no. 2, re-printed at the end of the "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers". Here Li was not referring to her stories, but about the difficulty of recounting history, specifically that from her own experiences before she left China for America. It struck me that, as the powers-that-be have no qualms about re-writing history, the writers themselves conversely become ever more cautious about the way they tell their stories.)