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“I also hate cyclists posing in sunglasses and all the pro gear, thinking they’re cool when they couldn’t even pedal up the modest slope of Yang-teh Boulevard. You know the type: guy with a bulging gut who parks his expensive bike by the side of the road to show it off. Whenever I see a guy like that, I hope his chain falls off. Or that he gets a flat or a broken spoke.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“The love of old things is a way of respecting time.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“I read Hans Christian Andersen when I was young and don’t recall a single tale that wasn’t heavy. And that was how I got a feel for, you know, the one-legged little tin soldier who could never catch up with the ballerina he was courting. If you can accept that—that some things aren’t meant to be, that you can’t get all you want—you can be more accepting in your own life.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“every kind of animal has its own natural grace, its own dignity. Life has diversified into myriad kinds, each living in its own forthright yet mysterious way upon the earth. Life was not formless like smoke, but had a pattern and a posture.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“The first time I ever saw an elephant I was literally scared stiff. To think there could be a living creature as hard as a rock and as strong as a river, a creature whose nose was so nimble it could pick up nuts and yet powerful enough to whack over great trees”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“The moment a man traverses a mountain range on a bicycle, he is like the first Mongolian you ever lept onto a wild horse on the steppe -- a rearing, snorting, bucking creature no one had ever thought to tame, because taming it would be on thinkable. The rider's body senses the Earth moving underfoot, a sensation humans have never known before, and which remains impossible to measure.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“Sometimes I think that in the end all art is selfish, that it won't necessarily change other people's minds-but whatever it changes, you yourself knows best.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle

“the Taiwan Nichi Nichi Shimpō, Taiwan’s first daily newspaper, dated 27 September in the thirty-eighth year of the Meiji era.”
― Wu Ming-Yi, The Stolen Bicycle