Taiwan Quotes

“Suicide. This is the exact opposite of last time, for this time I'm experiencing a kind of pleasure in life, in being alive, a pleasure in living that I've never experienced before, and I'm hopeful and confident that I can become someone with dignity. I know now why I couldn't change certain characteristics and certain things about myself, but it's not a problem anymore. Certain pathways I failed to open in the past have now opened. My whole self is radiating light. I see with clarity. I understand the cause and effect of the last year. What I had imagined I've now attained. It's as if I can see my life right in front of my eyes, and all I have to do is reach out and draw it in... Now I don't feel the acute pain I felt before; I feel enlightened, at peace. It's as if I've instantly found the secret of "Suffering", how to bear it and how to endure it... Yes, this time I've decided to kill myself not because I can't live with suffering and not because I don't enjoy being alive. I love life passionately, and my wish to die is a wish to live...

Yes, I've chosen suicide. The endpoint of this process of "Forgiveness". Not to punish anyone or to protest a wrong. I've chosen suicide with a clarity I've never possessed before, with a rational resolve and sense of calm, in order to pursue the ultimate meaning of my life, act on my belief about the beauty between two people... I take complete responsibility for my life, and even if my physical body disappears upon death, I don't believe my spirit will disappear. As long as I have loved people fully, then I can be content fading into "Nothingness". If I'm using death to express my passion for life, then I still don't love her enough, don't love life enough. and I will reincarnate in a different form to love her and to be part of her life... So the death of my flesh really doesn't mean anything. Doesn't solve anything.

Is this a tragedy? Will there be tragedy?”
― Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre

“I’d learned so much from traveling to familiar places that I figured I’d learn twice as much by going to a place I knew nothing about.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.”
― Gerry Abbey

“We are curious creatures, we Taiwanese. Orphans. Eventually, orphans must choose their own names and write their own stories. The beauty of orphanhood is the blank slate.”
― Shawna Yang Ryan, Green Island

“And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“For me, water means a lot of things. It's my belief that human beings are just like plants. They can't live without water or they'll dry up. Human beings, without love or other nourishment, also dry up. The more water you see in my movies, the more the characters need to fill a gap in their lives, to get hydrated again.”
― Ming-liang Tsai

“Except Ma doesn't measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields were she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in her Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“Qiao Guanhua and I drafted the last remaining section of the Shanghai Communiqué ...

The U.S. side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”
― Henry Kissinger, On China

“In Taiwan during the 1960s and mainland China in the 1980s, conceptualism played a role similar to that of Dada, that is, as a vehicle for upsetting conventions - aesthetic, social, and political. Almost all Chinese conceptual artists proclaimed an allegiance to Dada. On the mainland, they also embraced traditional Chan Budhism, wich encourages an ironic sensibility and rejects the privileging of any one doctrine in the search for enlightment. Combined, Dada and Chan Budhism became a potent weapon in the Chinese avant-garde's assault on business as usual.”
― Gao Minglu

“There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.”
― Gerry Abbey, Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise

“On the one hand, these filmmakers are the descendants of the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the century. One of the important ideological components of the May Fourth movement was its radical antitraditional stance, exemplified by its famous slogan: "Smash the Confucian Temple" (zalan kongjiadian).”
― Tonglin Lu, Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China

“Grandfather Shi must have loved Ita Thao. His relatives were certainly making his last hours there memorable ones. Though the ceremony did not have strippers (at least none that we saw), there was no shortage of other elements designed to produce 'hot noise' that's an indispensable feature of any Taiwanese funeral. Designed to celebrate the life of the deceased and ensure their smooth passing into the next world, Grandfather Shi's hot noise included gongs mixed with rigorous Buddhist chanting, pop music, karaoke, and later, a live band complete with drummers and an accordion. All of this was taking place under a covered tent set up in the alleyway next to the Cherry Feast Resort, where we'd booked a three-day stay in advance.”
― Joshua Samuel Brown

“There is a Chinese superstition that those who commit suicide wearing red clothes will become powerful, vengeful ghosts. They will come back and seek retribution for the injury done to them when they were still alive.”
― Yu-Han Chao, Sex & Taipei City

“I'll marry your father, any man I can ride away from here. The irony: We're the same as Ma. That's what Ma did, marry out of her country, marry out of her body.”
― K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

“The invasion of Taiwan will be a navy war.”
― Steven Magee

“Two wars on opposite sides of the world will stretch the USA war machine thin!”
― Steven Magee

“Through the mirror of my mind
Time after time, I see reflections of you and me
Reflections of the way life used to be
Reflections of the love you took from me”
― Diana Ross, ALL THE GREAT HITS

“Some people—like the engineers and executives of high-tech corporations—are way ahead of politicians and voters and are better informed than most of us about the development of AI, cryptocurrencies, social credits, and the like. Unfortunately, most of them don’t use their knowledge to help regulate the explosive potential of the new technologies. Instead, they use it to make billions of dollars—or to accumulate petabits of information. There are exceptions, like Audrey Tang. She was a leading hacker and software engineer who in 2014 joined the Sunflower Student Movement, which protested against government policies in Taiwan. The Taiwanese cabinet was so impressed by her skills that Tang was eventually invited to join the government as its minister of digital affairs. In that position, she helped make the government’s work more transparent to citizens. She was also credited with using digital tools to help Taiwan successfully contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Yet Tang’s political commitment and career path are not the norm. For every computer-science graduate who wants to be the next Audrey Tang, there are probably many more who want to be the next Jobs, Zuckerberg, or Musk and build a multibillion-dollar corporation rather than become an elected public servant. This leads to a dangerous information asymmetry. The people who lead the information revolution know far more about the underlying technology than the people who are supposed to regulate it.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI