Notes of a Crocodile Quotes

“Secretly though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn't have a whole lot going on.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Unhealthy love is two people stoking a shared fantasy of desperate beauty, weaponizing passion and desire.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I’d taken everyone I loved and killed them off in my heart, one by one. I’d long been tending their graves—secretly visiting and mourning during the day, going out and erecting a cross on starry nights, lying inside and awaiting my own death on starless nights. That was my Atlantis, the kingdom I’d built in the name of separation. I’d never before unearthed so much of myself, and so suddenly at that. Inside the world of my tomb, everyone else was dead, I alone survived, and that was the reason for my sorrow.
It didn’t take long to spot the largest sarcophagus. It was the one in which Shui Ling had been entombed, and across the front, it read: This woman is madly in love with me. And then reality finally hit me. I had my old schema (which offered a peephole, really) to blame for my decision to leave this woman, to kill her and preserve her body in this sarcophagus, where she’d stay mine forever. I’d evaded the perils of real relationships and robbed her of the ability to change with time. These two prospects had given rise to “my deep-rooted fear of a real separation, which in turn yielded the avoidant mentality that had only hastened it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“For a long time, my hidden shame had made me push everyone away. I'd rejected them before they could reject me. I ran away from close relationships even with the people who loved me. I was a blind man fallen into the ocean.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I wish I could fall in love with a man, but there are too many beautiful women.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness worse.' I realize that's exactly what I did: I used love to fight illness, and it ruined me. I have to change my ways. I can't be like that anymore.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Sweeping that other me into their arms, they led me in a dance within societal norms, along a trajectory based on a delusion. (Though I couldn't define what I was, I knew what I wasn't.)”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Someday you'll find someone who's the total package. Right now you're sowing your oats, and that's not a bad thing. Life is a process of awakening by degrees, in depth and in scope. At its most profound moments, you experience wholeness.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man's greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“In the end, the world didn't owe me anything, not even half a chance. That was the hand I'd been dealt in life, and while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility- from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it's every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Separation was the thing I'd been dreading the most these past few years, and I'd been in denial that it was a fact of life. Refusing to let go, I'd practically thrown a temper tantrum. What's worse, my attempts to avoid separation had only hastened it. It explained why I'd always been so quick to lash out at those I loved.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Like death, college serves as a kind of escape hatch. But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Though I couldn't define what I was, I knew what I wasn't. I was shown the limits, and being confined within a set of walls tormented me and drained me of life, for the real me spanned multitudes, stretching far beyond the bounds of normality encircling ninety percent of the human race.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“My time was gradually consumed by tears. The whole world loves me, but what does it matter since I hate myself?”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money, The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fear that I was pure carrion inside.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I don’t want to become myself. I know the answer to the riddle, but I can’t stand to have it revealed. The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I became obsessed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. I devoured all kinds of books for tortured souls. Started collecting issues of the independence movement's weekly. Studied up on political game theory, an antidote to my spiritual reading. It made me feel like an outsider, which became my way of recharging. At the break of dawn, around six or seven like a nocturnal creature afraid of the light, I'd finally lay my head - which by then was spilling over with thoughts - down onto the comforter.
That's how it went when things were good.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Here’s a delusional and misguided hypothesis: If I could just fall in love with a man, it would put an end to the anguish of having fallen in love with a woman by somehow overwriting that earlier consciousness.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The best way for any relationship to end is with the sentiment I wish the best for you, and I am grateful for what we once had together.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“...while detachment was enough for me to withstand hatred, extricating myself from the jaws of suffering called for enough detachment to exercise cruelty.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The power to construct oneself is destiny”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The crocodile had talked nonstop for three straight days without sleeping. Though I was dog-tired by then, I remembered its last words: “I gotta pee!”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“Listening to her talk about movies was the greatest pleasure of all, not just because of her eloquence but because the only time she shed her self-consciousness and guardedness was when she was wrapped up in her feelings about a movie.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“This journal from freshman year is the only thing I can give you. I’m not your everything anymore, so even though I want to love you now, all I can do is give you the old me, the one you once loved.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“The college lifestyle is about becoming independent, with no one else around to force you to do anything. So there's this muck that hasn't been dealt with, and because all your arrangements are loose now, you have no one to hold on to, which means you get sucked into the vacuum cleaner and tossed around in it.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I am a woman who loves women. The tears I cry, they spring from a river and drain across my face like yolk.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile