27 Peter Hessler Quotes on America, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Peter Hessler quotes. There are more than 27 quotes in our Peter Hessler quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Peter Hessler wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like America, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, "Stop looking behind you!: There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on mirrors only; the blind spot didn't exist, at least not in Coach Tang's eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist’s diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer’s presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it’s described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. When I wrote about people, I wanted to describe the ways we interacted, the things we shared and the things that separated us.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

But there were reports that Jiang and other members of the Old Guard were resisting retirement, and experts said that the Beidaihe meetings would be the first battleground of the political transition. Communist China had never had an orderly succession—for half a century, every transfer of power had involved coups or power struggles.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn't expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, history- all of it has to be learned, and the task seems impossible. Then, just as you begin to catch on, you realize that everybody else feels pretty much the same way. The place changes too fast; nobody in China has the luxury of being confident in his knowledge. Who shows a peasant how to find a factory job? How does a former Maoist learn to start a business? Who has the slightest clue how to run a car rental agency? Everything is figured out on the fly; the people are masters at improvisation. This is the second moment of recognition, and it's even more frightening than the first. Awareness of your own ignorance is a lonely feeling, but there's little consolation in sharing it with 1.3 billion neighbors

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

The words of history are also the words of war.

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present Quotes

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

The joy of nonfiction is searching for balance between storytelling and reporting, finding a way to be both loquacious and observant.

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge?

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

mental institutions, rural health clinics. Once, he met

Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West Quotes

The decorating scheme of Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

Every always says that their product is the best," said Mr.Wang. "They have to talk about how much better they are than the competition, and usually they believe it. But the truth is that it's much easier once you realize that your product is inferior. Then you can focus on just doing business!

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present Quotes

That's the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then in must be useful.

I hit him as hard as I could. His hands were full of my belongings, and every time I punched him he dropped something. I slugged him and my camera popped out; I hit him again and there was my money belt; another punch and my shorts flew up in the air.

China Quotes Chinese Quotes Unsavory elements Quotes Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China Quotes

I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn’t have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs.

Oracle Bones Quotes

Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.

Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Quotes

People with good memories are liable to be crushed by the weight of their suffering. Only those with bad memories, the fittest to survive, can live on. - Lu Xun

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Quotes

I like to play chess. I moved to a small town, and nobody played chess there, but one guy challenged me to checkers. I always thought it was kind of a simple game, but I accepted. And he beat me nine or ten games in a row. That’s sort of like living in a small town. It’s a simpler game, but it’s played to a higher level.

I realized that as a thinking person his advantage lay precisely in his lack of formal education. Nobody told him what to think, and thus he was free to think clearly.

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze Quotes

The American appetite for loneliness impressed me, and there was something about this solitude that freed conversation. One night at a bar, I met a man, and within five minutes he explained that he had just been released from prison. Another drinker told me that his wife had passed away, and he had recently suffered a heart attack, and now he hoped that he would die within the year. I learned that there's no reliable small talk in America; at any moment a conversation can become personal.

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