Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese-born British novelist, essayist, filmmaker, and artist. She was born on November 5, 1973, in a fishing village in Zhejiang province, China. Guo is known for her works in both English and Chinese languages, and she often explores themes related to cultural identity, migration, and the complexities of modern life.

Guo’s notable works include novels such as “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers” (2007), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and “I Am China” (2014). She has also written essays and made documentaries, addressing topics ranging from her personal experiences to broader socio-political issues.

In addition to her literary pursuits, Xiaolu Guo has gained recognition as a filmmaker. Her film “She, a Chinese” won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2009. She has continued to work in the realms of both literature and cinema, contributing to the global conversation on cross-cultural communication and the immigrant experience.

Xiaolu Guo Quotes

1. “Its important to be comfortable with uncertainty.”
— Xiaolu Guo

2. “I’m saying language is a passport. A dubious, dangerous passport too.”
— Xiaolu Guo

3. “But why people need privacy? Why privacy is important? In China, every family live together, grandparents, parents, daughter, son and their relatives too. Eat together and share everything, talk about everything. Privacy make people lonely. Privacy make family fallen apart.”
— Xiaolu Guo

4. “I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That’s what they have every day.”
— Xiaolu Guo

5. “In China we believe “rob the rich to feed the poor.” But robbers here have no poetry.”
— Xiaolu Guo

6. “Everyone tries to be an optimist. But being an optimist is a bit boring and not honest. Losers are more interesting than winners.”
— Xiaolu Guo

7. “I don’t feel naked around you anymore.”
— Xiaolu Guo

8. “Don’t worry, she deserved it anyway. She’s no good, that girl. Much too individualistic.”
— Xiaolu Guo

9. “About time, what I really learned from studying English is: time is different with timing. I understand the difference of these two words so well. I understand falling in love with the right person in the wrong timing could be the greatest sadness in a person’s entire life.”
— Xiaolu Guo

10. “If I’m sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I’d cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn’t stand it and I’d swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a clidd. So, I come here instead where there’s so much water already I can weep in peace.”
— Xiaolu Guo

11. “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.”
— Xiaolu Guo

12. “My youth began when I was 21. At least, that’s when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life – some of them might possibly be for me.”
— Xiaolu Guo

13. “Everything around me was changing so fast – my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere. Okay, so I was getting lots of work, but it was all the same. Woman Waiting on the Platform, Lady in Waiting, Bored Waitress. I was only in my twenties, but I felt seventy. I had to do something, ask my brain to start working, so I could match this fast-moving city.”
— Xiaolu Guo

14. “Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.”
— Xiaolu Guo

15. “Maybe I not need feeling lonely, because I can talk to other “me.” Is like seeing my two pieces of lips speaking in two languages at same time. Yes, I not lonely, because I with another me. Like Austin Powers with his Mini Me.”
— Xiaolu Guo

16. “I became a person who was very good at hiding her emotions. Maybe that was why people thought I was heartless. Apparently my face often had a blank expression. Huizi, my most intellectual friend, would say, “Fenfang, yours is the face of a post-modern woman.”
— Xiaolu Guo

17. “Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, these cockroaches were sadomasochists, looking for the most painful way to die. Once I swallowed one absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatized, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.”
— Xiaolu Guo

18. “When I left my village, it was like I took a step with my right foot and, by the time my left foot came to join it, four years had passed.”
— Xiaolu Guo

19. “People desperately want to spend their money. Maybe they think that’s the most effective way to feel alive.”
— Xiaolu Guo

20. “I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.”
— Xiaolu Guo

21. “English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese.”
— Xiaolu Guo

22. “I couldn’t believe a mother and her daughter could have so much to say to each other. In my family, no one talked. In my family, people lived like insects, like worms, like slugs hanging on the back door of the house.”
— Xiaolu Guo

23. “In all my time in Beijing, I’d never managed to have a female friend. It seemed every woman in this city was busy either with her kids or with her mortgage.”
— Xiaolu Guo

24. “Each leaf had shuddered in the wind on any given yesterday. Each cloud drifting overhead had blown across those skies the year before. Nothing had changed, and nothing could change. The world felt frozen in front of me, like a family photo trapped in a frame. This landscape had imprisoned me since I was born.”
— Xiaolu Guo

25. “Humans need cages around their bodies – wombs, houses, coffins.”
— Xiaolu Guo

26. “Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn’t be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn’t be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest.”
— Xiaolu Guo

27. “Once love is brought down to earth, and weighed, it’s over, it’s dead. – But don’t you agree that real love is the love that’s brought down to earth? It’s only real when it’s mixed up with dirt and sweat. Otherwise, it’s just for puppies and adolescents!”
— Xiaolu Guo