Toi Feigel

“Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.

Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“(...), j'étais animée d'une faim nouvelle, et certains jours, j'étais véritablement vorace. Le besoin de lire s'emparait de moi et exerçait sa délicieuse et grisante emprise. Plus je lisais, plus j'avais faim. Chaque ouvrage était riche de promesses, chaque page que je tournais était une équipée, l'attrait d'un autre monde.”
― Tatiana de Rosnay, The House I Loved

“Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Blank Book

“Hey, handsome,” she said when she opened the door, and I turned around to look over my shoulder to pretend she meant it for someone else. Her”
― Pittacus Lore, The Power of Six