A Quote by Ba Jin

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace. — © Ba Jin
I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men.
I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected o the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.
I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.
I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he is too lazy or too afraid to go and put the fire out.
Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
It was peace. Peace is when you would shake the hands of the people around you. And you knew peace was coming because the priest would say it five times rapid fire. He'd go, “My peace I leave, my peace I give to you. While we ate Reese's Pieces with the Lord. And I have a piece of lint in my peaceful eye"!
I'm still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family's experience with it. If I had been able to write 'The Pura Principle' back in those days, I'm positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false.
Tess had said that the river was liable to wash the palace and the city and the whole kingdom off the rocks, and then there would finally be peace in the world. "Peace in the world," Brigan repeated musingly when Fire told him. "I suppose she's right. That would bring peace to the world. But it's not likely to happen, so I suppose we'll have to keep blundering on and making a mess of it." "Oh," Fire said, "well put. We'll have to pass that on to the governor so he can use it in his speech when they dedicate the new bridge.
But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it’s like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can’t just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.
If you have peace of mind, when you meet with problems and difficulties they won’t disturb your inner peace. You’ll be able to employ your human intelligence more effectively. But, if your mental state is disturbed, full of emotion, it is very difficult to cope with problems, because the mind that is full of emotion is biased, unable to see reality. So whatever you do will be unrealistic and naturally fail.
I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you must write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.
I think your emotion changes from person to person. As you get older, a lot of people become cynical because of the experiences they have had and haven't been able to let go of, whether they've been cheated on or whether it hasn't worked out. It's so easy to turn around right now and say, "Just let it go."
If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.
It's just nice to be able to communicate and be able to identify with a lot of different cultures. I have no idea what it would be like to be just one thing and speak one language. I feel enormously privileged to travel and be able to mingle and speak to people that, had I only known English, I wouldn't have been able to meet.
When I was 20, 21 years old, I had just got married. Put yourself in my wife's shoes. All of these fans all across the world would have Donny Osmond burning - record-burning parties. They would put my albums and burn them.
'Prisoner' is not a direct 'I've just been divorced' album, although that fire is burning very well on the record.
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