Dream of the Red Chamber

"滴不尽相思血泪抛红豆，开不完春柳春花满画楼，睡不稳纱窗风雨黄昏后，忘不了新愁与旧愁。"

"况从幼时和黛玉耳鬓厮磨，心情相对。"

"人有聚就有散，聚时欢喜，到散时岂不冷清？既清冷则伤感，所以不如倒是不聚的好。"

"我不过挨了几下打，他们一个个就有这些怜惜悲感之态露出，令人可玩可观，可怜可敬。假若我一时竟遭殃横死，他们还不知是何等悲感呢！既是他们这样，我便一时死了，得他们如此，一生事业纵然尽付东流，亦无足叹惜，冥冥之中若不怡然自得，亦可谓糊涂鬼祟矣。"

"人谁不死，只要死的好。那些个须眉浊物，只知道文死谏，武死战，这二死是大丈夫死名死节。竟何如不死的好！"

"玉烛滴干风里泪，晶帘隔破月中痕。"

"数去更无君傲世，看来惟有我知音。 秋光荏苒休孤负，相对原宜惜寸阴。"

"姑奶奶定要依我这名字，他必长命百岁。"

"又听见窗外竹梢蕉叶之上，雨声淅沥，清寒透幕。"

"万两黄金容易得，知心一个也难求！"

"女孩兒未出嫁是顆無價寶珠，出了嫁不知怎么就變出許多不好的毛病兒來，再老了，更不是珠子，竟是魚眼睛了。分明一個人，怎么變出三樣來。"

"不經一事，不長一智。"

"明是一盆火，暗是一把刀。"

"桃花帘外东风软，桃花帘内晨妆懒。 帘外桃花帘内人，人与桃花隔不远。"

"泪眼观花泪易干，泪干春尽花憔悴。 憔悴花遮憔悴人，花飞人倦易黄昏。"

"一声杜宇春归尽，寂寞帘栊空月痕。"

"蜂围蝶阵乱纷纷：几曾随逝水？岂必委芳尘？万缕千丝终不改，任他随聚随分。韶华休笑本无根：好风凭借力，送我上青云。"

"寒塘渡鹤影，冷月葬诗魂。"

"花原自怯，岂奈狂飚？柳本多愁，何禁骤雨！"

"茜纱窗下，我本无缘；黄土陇中，卿何薄命！"

"但凡家庭之事，不是东风压了西风，就是西风压了东风。"

"又想梦中光景，无倚无靠，再真把宝玉死了，那可怎么样好！一时痛定思痛，神魂俱乱。"

"任凭弱水三千，我只取一瓢饮。"

"忽然听着黛玉说道：“宝玉，你为什么病了？”宝玉笑道：“我为林姑娘病了。”"

"见案上红灯，窗前皓月，依然锦绣丛中，繁华世界。定神一想，原来竟是一场大梦。浑身冷汗，觉得心内清爽。仔细一想，真正无可奈何，不过长叹数声。"

"“宝玉！宝玉！你好——”"

"香魂一缕随风散，愁绪三更入梦遥！"

"“林妹妹，林妹妹！好好兒的，是我害了你了！你別怨我，只是父母作主，并不是我負心！”"

"宝玉的事，明知他病中不能明白，所以众人弄鬼弄神的办成了；后来宝玉明白了，旧病复发，时常哭想，并非忘情负义之徒。今日这种柔情，一发叫人难受。只可怜我们林姑娘真真是无福消受他。如此看来，人生缘分，都有一定，在那未到头时，大家都是痴心妄想，及至无可如何，那糊涂的也就不理会了，那情深义重的也不过临风对月，洒泪悲啼。可怜那死的倒未必知道，这活的真真是苦恼伤心，无休无了。算来竟不如草木石头，无知无觉，倒也心中干净。"

"假去真來真勝假，無原有是有非無。"

"我所居兮青埂之峰，我所游兮鴻蒙太空。 誰與我逝兮吾誰與從？渺渺茫茫兮歸彼大荒！"

"說到辛酸處，荒唐愈可悲。由來衕一夢，休笑世人痴！"

"The memorial to my beloved girls could at one and the same time serve as a source of harmless entertainment and as a warning to those who were in the same predicament as myself but who were still in need of awakening."

"The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words."

"One can not call himself erudite without touching upon Red Mansions in his talk."

"Unlike books such as The Plum in the Golden Vase that sought to take revenge and to vent anger, Dream of the Red Chamber based all of its events on the author’s personal experiences. Remorseful for what he had experienced in his life for decades, the author was preoccupied with confessing his own sins and criticizing himself."

"Honglou meng is a book about enlightenment [or awakening]. ... A man in his life experiences several decades of winter and summer. The most sagacious and wise is certainly not submerged in considerations of loss and gain. However, the experiences of prosperity and decline, coming together and dispersing [of family members and friends] are too common; how can his mind be like wood and stone, without being moved by all this? In the beginning there is a profusion of intimate feelings, which is followed by tears and lamentations. Finally, there is a time when one feels that everything he does is futile. At this moment, how can he not be enlightened?"

"The celebrated Dream of the Red Chamber, though set, by general and just verdict, at the head of seric fiction, and though a work of art of which no nation need be ashamed, is yet at a great disadvantage on account of its bulk. Its tremendous length, no less than twenty volumes; the vast number of persons involved in the story; and the complicatedly mysterious character of the introductory chapters, make it a book which perhaps the most heroic efforts of enthusiastic scholars will never succeed in introducing to the world of western letters."

"HUNG-LOU-MÊNG: 紅樓夢. A famous Chinese novel in the Peking dialect, popularly known as the Dream of the Red Chamber, dealing chiefly with events of domestic life which are very graphically described, and attributed to Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in of the 17th cent. Many Chinese are said to have died for love of the heroine, Miss Lin, so exquisitely has that young lady been portrayed by the author; but the book being considered a dangerous one to fall into the hands of youth was accordingly placed in the Index Expurgatorius of China [...]. The title should properly be "The Dream of the Red-storeyed Mansion," the allusion being to the wealthy establishment at which the scene of the story is laid, and to the pomp and power of its inmates, destined by the inevitable turn of Fortune's wheel to lapse into poverty and decay."

"The Hung Lou Mêng, conveniently but erroneously known as "The Dream of the Red Chamber," is the work...touching the highest point of development reached by the Chinese novel. ... No fewer than 400 personages of more or less importance are introduced first and last into the story, the plot of which is worked out with a completeness worthy of Fielding, while the delineation of character—of so many characters—recalls the best efforts of the greatest novelists of the West. As a panorama of Chinese social life, in which almost every imaginable feature is submitted in turn to the reader, the Hung Lou Mêng is altogether without a rival. Reduced to its simplest terms, it is an original and effective love story, written for the most part in an easy, almost colloquial, style, full of humorous and pathetic episodes of everyday human life, and interspersed with short poems of high literary finish. The opening chapters, which are intended to form a link between the world of spirits and the world of mortals, belong to the supernatural; after that the story runs smoothly along upon earthly lines, always, however, overshadowed by the near presence of spiritual influences..."

"Dream of the Red Chamber may be regarded as the tragedy of tragedies."

"[W]orthy of being considered as the one great masterpiece in the realm of Chinese art."

"One of the best known, and probably the best of Chinese works of fiction. ... It abounds in humour and pathos, and is invaluable for anyone who would study the social life of the Chinese."

"It is obvious that Dream of the Red Chamber is an autobiographical work in which facts are disguised. If Cao Xueqin is indeed the author, he is the deeply remorseful "I" that makes his appearance at the beginning of the novel and also the model of Zhen (real) Baoyu and Jia (fake) Baoyu. With this in mind, we can understand that the Jia household and the Zhen household in the novel are reflections of Cao Xueqin's own household."

"The author was of a very wealthy and over-refined family that fell into poverty in a very short time. Ts'ao-chan took to drinking and died young. In his book he describes the glory of bygone days. We see how Chia Pao-yu grows up in the midst of the girls of the family, which brings about a great number of love-tangles and tragedies. The most pathetic is Pao-yu's love for Lin Tai-yu who dies of love-sickness after Pao-yu's parents have tricked him into a marriage with another girl. Pao-yu leaves home and meets his father when, many years later, he has died to the world and became a monk."

"Dream of the Red Chamber, so revolutionary in many ways, is nevertheless easily recognizable as the descendant of these [All Men Are Brothers, Monkey, and Romance of Three Kingdoms] three great popular romances. It has their inordinate length (it is certain that The Red Chamber, as planned by Tsao, ran to at least a hundred chapters), their lack of faith in the interestingness of the everyday world, leading to the conviction that a realistic story must necessarily be set in a supernatural framework. It has the story-teller's tendency to put far more art into the technique of the individual séance or chapter, than into the construction of the work as a whole. It has the same moralizing tendency; for, as I have said, Chinese fiction is always on the defensive—is always, with an eye on official Puritanism, trying to prove that, like serious and approved literature, it has a "message." In The Red Chamber indeed this message is reserved for the later chapters, which Tsao did not live to complete. But we know that the edifying final episodes (for example, Pao-Yu's entry into the Buddhist Church) were part of the author's original plan. But the Dream of the Red Chamber is unlike all previous Chinese novels in that Tsao, instead of embroidering upon existing legends or histories, describes a group of people wholly unknown to the reader; and stranger innovation still, these people (as Dr. Hu Shih has proved) are the author and his family. All realistic novels are, of course, autobiographical, the writer's knowledge of realities being drawn chiefly from his own experience. But The Red Chamber is autobiographical in a more complete sense. Indeed, one even feels that, were it not for the rigid framework imposed by tradition, Tsao might easily have fallen into the error of transcribing with too careful a fidelity the monotonies of actual life. [...] It is in his accounts of dreams that as an imaginative writer Tsao Hsueh-Chin rises to his greatest heights; and it is in these passages that we feel most clearly the symbolic or universal value of his characters—Pao-Yu, the hero, standing for Imagination and Poetry; his father, for all those sordid powers of pedantry and restriction that hamper the artist in his passage through life."

"No mere summary can be just to the extraordinary content of such a realistic and diversified story of Chinese family life as "The Dream of the Red Chamber" presents within its strange setting. This is a great novel. With "The Three Kingdoms" it ranks foremost among the novels of the old Chinese literature. ... The effort to read "The Dream of the Red Chamber" is eminently worth making."

"In my view, Baoyu, having seen so many deaths, is convinced that most of the people he loves are confronted with all kinds of troubles and that most of the people in the world are unfortunate. Only monks can stay out of trouble and have few worries and a modicum of happiness in life."

"The Hung Lou Mêng is in every way a unique book. No Chinese novel can compare with it, either for the grace and refinement of the language...or for the subtle characterisation and artistic integrity of the plot."

"The book contains 120 chapters, 235 male and 213 female characters. According to the Chinese critics it is unique of its kind. The plot is perfect, the style is finished. It is written in the language of the better classes of Peking at the time of its appearance. Also in this novel, according to the same critics, love is expressed in the most perfect way. Who knows how many readers, men as well as women, have been moved to tears by the death of Ch'ing Wen and Tai Yu. Every feeling, every gesture in the book is natural."