"Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night I go to seek the shining light."

"The sky is grey The road is grey The building is grey The rain is grey Through this stretch of dead ash Walked two ch…"

"Clouds that are grey Can no longer be washed clean. We open the umbrella And simply paint the sky black."

"It is probably safe to say that Gu Cheng was the most radical poet in all of China's 2,500 years of written poetry."

"“What happened to her books?” “They went up in smoke. Confiscated by the Red Guards, who promptly burnt them in publi…"

"We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read."

"Four-Eyes’s parents probably wanted their son to be a writer. They must have thought it would be good for him to read…"

"Picture, if you will, a boy of nineteen, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revol…"

"I hadn’t suspected that a tiny glimmer of hope for the future could transform someone so utterly."

"It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well …"