Quotes by Xueqin Cao

“most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man’s wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural.””

“No remedy but love Can make the lovesick well; Only the hand that tied the knot Can loose the tiger’s bell.””

“If with the water’s rosy hue comparison be made,Carmine tears and dewy flowers seem of the self-same shade.Yet lady’s tears and flowers in this unalike I find,That the flowers are still and smiling, but the tears flow unallayed.As she gazes on the smiling flowers, her tears at last grow dry;But as they dry, the springtime ends and the flowers fade. The flowers fade, and an equal blight the lady’s fair cheek palls.The petals drift; she is weary; and soon the darkness falls.A nightingale is singing a dirge for the death of spring,And moonlight steals through the casement and dapples the silent walls.””

“Better by far the destiny of plant or stone, bereft of knowledge and consciousness, but blessed at least with purity and peace of mind!””

“Any doctor will do in an emergency.””

“Can I, that these flowers’ obsequies attend, Divine how soon or late my life will end? Let others laugh flower-burial to see: Another year who will be burying me? As petals drop and spring begins to fail, The bloom of youth, too, sickens and turns pale. One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled. The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.””

“A chorus of Golden Pages and Jade Maidens came onto the stage, fairy streamers fluttering and flags aloft, to reveal in their midst a gorgeously attired lady, her head draped in black, her costume shimmering with””

“Perhaps my fellow humans whom the dream of life has ensnared may find in this tale an echo, may be summoned back by it to their true home; while free spirits of the high hills may find in the record of Brother Stone’s transformations, as in that older tale of the Migration of the Magic Mountain, a reflected light to quicken their own aspirations.””

“Now as I bury the flowers, others laugh at my folly;But in that future year, who knows who will bury me?””

“Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining them and comparing them in my mind's eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls - which is all they were then - were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the 'grave and mustachioed signior' I am now supposed to have become.””

“gleaming like some fairy princess with sparkling jewels and gay embroideries. Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls. It was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains. Her necklet was of red gold in the form of a coiling dragon. Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raised gold thread. Her jacket was lined with ermine. It was of a slate-blue stuff with woven insets in coloured silks. Her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crêpe embroidered with flowers.””

“To hold the garden’s fragrance in one vase, And see all autumn in a single spray?””

“My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.””