Ba Jin Quotes

People in misery is what most important in art.

Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I'm inspired by whatever I see, feel, hear about, watch on the TV...anything. It can be something that I really need to get off my chest so I write or something a friend is going through which gets my thoughts going.

The anguish I always feel when she's in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face.

The problem of suffering is not about something but about someone.

I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.

That is the real problem of depression - a condition which will affect an estimated one in five of the population at some point in their lives. It is completely unimaginable until you have been through it.

Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.

The closer you are to people, the more you realise what has happened to them.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.

For me, music is therapeutic, so the songs that came to me the easiest came from the most devastating moments of my life.

It is difficult to ever think about your loved one having suffered.

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

The suffering of a loved one was in many ways worse than one's one suffering because it left one feeling so very helpless.

I'm constantly on the brink of tears in conversation about things that happen to people.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.