I used to scatter thoughts everywhere whenever something stirred in me. Putting them together now feels like a small act of remembrance.

1. I want to record my real life and my real state of mind, and keep meeting life with a habit of reflection. I write now and then, not to please anyone else, but to examine myself. I do not ask to sound profound, but I refuse to be shallow. I only want to be true.

2. I once saw a young girl helping an elderly woman walk slowly down the road. When she noticed me looking at her, she lowered her head and gave a shy little smile, the kind that came straight from the heart. In that instant, she seemed like the most beautiful girl in the world. How many girls in this age still truly understand what shyness means?

3. When I am at home, I write on a computer. When I am out, I jot a few casual lines on my phone. A person should learn persistence, but also learn how to adapt to changing circumstances. Life needs resilience.

4. Even the little pink flowers by the roadside seem to understand persistence. At noon they bloom brightly, and by afternoon they droop. I used to think that meant they were finished, but when the sun came out the next day, there they were again, open and alive. Beauty, too, can come from endurance. Suddenly even an ordinary flower seems lovely.

5. A scene stays with me: at a crowded intersection, everyone is busy with their own affairs, and only one boy lifts his head to watch a hydrogen balloon drift slowly across the blue sky.

6. Once the ground is covered by buildings, no green wheat will ever grow there again, and no golden rapeseed flowers will ever bloom there again.

7. If the whole world is asleep and only you are awake, you feel lonely. If the whole world is awake and only you are asleep, you feel numb. If both you and the whole world are awake, then you feel pain.

8. Memory always carries sadness, because when something has been lost or has passed away, we no longer have the chance to cherish it.

9. The world is impossible to predict. And yet, in the instant your spirit wakes up, you may suddenly see the confusion of your entire life.

10. After so many years, there are many things you have learned to take lightly, and many people you no longer wish to remember. So why do certain old matters still hold you so tightly? Why do some faces still return when you least expect them?

11. It is fine to be nostalgic, but your gaze cannot remain fixed behind you. You still have to move forward with your feet on solid ground. Only then can you climb out of the mire of life's suffering and bring some peace to the people who love you.

12. No matter what your past contains, remember this: do not let your past become the reason the girl beside you feels hurt today and weeps tomorrow.

13. Time pushes everyone toward age. The boy once full of swagger now has white at his temples, and the beautiful face once framed by youth has begun to show fine lines. Even in The Warlords, Jet Li no longer carried the agile sharpness he had in earlier years, and that left me with a faint sense of loss.

14. “Facing the sea, with spring blossoms.” Whenever spring flowers burst into bloom, those eight words return to me. The one who wrote them is gone from the living world, while the sunlight outside the window remains as bright as ever. There is, perhaps, a kind of irony in that.

15. Portrait sketches often leave me with the same impression: the people in them always look rather ugly.

16. Every time I see reports about environmental destruction or severe soil erosion along the Yellow River and the Yangtze, I almost sneer at the scale of concern. What is that compared with the damage done to the human heart, or the erosion of the soul? That is what feels truly severe.

17. I believe two things matter deeply in life: having a dream, and having the courage to take responsibility. Without dreams, what separates a person from a salted fish? And if you do wrong and lack the courage to own it, that shames me more than humiliation itself.

18. Before sixty, do not be afraid. After sixty, do not live in regret. The rarest thing in life is to be sixteen and possess both dreams and action, and then to be sixty and still possess both passion and memory.

19. What are the two saddest things in the world? I think they are these: children no longer believe in fairy tales, and adults trust only money and power.

20. Love is like climbing a mountain. With every step, the scenery changes. Some people feel only exhaustion; others feel a quiet sense of reward.

21. If a person comes to know the self fully within a limited life, that life will shine more brightly than the life of someone who drifts through it in mediocrity. But pessimism and disgust with life, when trapped in confusion and a lack of self-awareness, only waste the years. Fanaticism is born from abandoning the self; despair is also born from underestimating oneself.

22. I have noticed that in the summer night sky there are fewer and fewer chances to see the stars scattered overhead. It feels much the same as growing older in this crowded mortal world: fewer and fewer chances to understand myself clearly, and to understand the world.

23. Technology creates civilization, war destroys civilization, and advances in technology also make war more devastating. Creation and destruction move together. Seen from that angle, is human civilization progressing, or moving backward? That question troubled me for a long time.

24. Alienation and assimilation happen at the same time. While humanity assimilates the world around it, it also alienates its own self.

25. If a person has no thought, can that person still be called whole? If a nation loses its capacity for thought, then from every angle, something about that nation becomes unhealthy.

26. Youth is precious, but not simply because of its bright colors or the passion it contains. Its deepest value lies elsewhere: for youth, tomorrow is still unknown.

27. The agricultural age has receded far from us, and the civilization it produced is slowly disappearing from sight. I miss the sugar figurines I ate as a child, and I miss the brilliant folk culture that once lived in the hands of traditional craftsmen.

28. I do not believe in national superiority, but I do feel that the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai is more moving than Romeo and Juliet. They become butterflies; that is why it is a true tragedy. That one image alone is enough to give foreign writers something to study for centuries.

29. Chinese ways of thinking and feeling are too repressed. There is too little wild imagination and too little expression powerful enough to shake the heart. Doubt it? A glance at the advertisements on state television is enough to show what I mean.

30. We said goodbye to the picturesque agricultural age, and then goodbye to the thunderous industrial age, only to enter a commercial age full of busyness and calculation. The pursuit of spirit and the sincerity of the inner life have waved farewell, replaced instead by the stale smell of money everywhere.

31. When spring warmth arrives but cold still returns, you feel it especially on the way to work in the morning. It is not only the weather that changes without warning. Human beings do too, and so does life itself.

32. Literature and opera, once the great spiritual forms of expression in the agricultural age, now survive only with difficulty in the commercial age. Traditional opera is consumed mainly when it comes prepackaged for easy viewing, and literature is left to self-styled elites producing vulgar words.

33. When I was younger, I longed for some grand, stormy love affair to break the stillness of life. Now that I am older, I understand that once the flowers have lost their brightest red, it is the plain and quiet fading that lingers longest in the heart.