In film, you have to present everything on the screen so it's the opposite of what I usually do with storytelling. It forced me to think about how people walk, where they sit at that moment. With Princess of Nebraska, it was just fun to watch because the movie was so far from the story. It was very much a different story.

Mrs. Pang was once a nanny for me, and she spoils me the way I imagined kindhearted women would spoil an orphan, loving me for whom I am, exactly the opposite of my mother, whose love I have to earn with great effort and with little success.

What is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive?

She wonders if this is what people call falling in love, the desire to be with someone for every minute of the rest of her life so strong that sometimes she is frightened of herself.

It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

The decaying that had dragged on for too long had only turned tragedy into nuisance; death, when it strikes, better completes its annihilating act on the first try.

The boy will remain a son and never become a father. He will be forgotten by the crowd once his blood is rinsed clean from the ground; his sister will think of him but soon she will forget him, too. He will live on only in Han's memory, a child punished not for his own insincerity but someone else's disbelief.