“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin foi um escritor chinês do século XVIII. Foi o autor de O Sonho da Câmara Vermelha, o romance mais importante escrito na língua chinesa de todos os tempos. Wikipedia

“Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Jia zuo zhen shi zhen yi jia,
Wu wei you chu you huan wu.
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 1
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Fall'n the great house once so secure in wealth,
Each scattered member shifting for himself.”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“All those whom history calls great
Left only empty names for us to venerate.”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 2
Cao Xueqin, as quoted in the introduction attributed to his younger brother (Cao Tangcun) to the first chapter of Dream of the Red Chamber, present in the jiaxu (1754) version (the earliest-known manuscript copy of the novel), translated by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone: The Golden Days (Penguin, 1973), pp. 20–21
“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Fonte: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5
“Let others laugh flower-burial to see:
Another year who will be burying me?”
Cao Xueqin livro Dream of the Red Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760)
“Words on the paper mix with blood,
The extraordinary labor of ten years!”
(zh-TW) 字字看來皆是血,十年辛苦不尋常 。
Red Inkstone, couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); quoted in Zhou Ruchang's Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181.
Couplet in the preface to Dream of the Red Chamber, 1754 Jiaxu manuscript (甲戌本); the couplet is "generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin" according to Wong Kwok-pun in Dreaming across Languages and Cultures (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), footnote on p. 71, but Zhou Ruchang attributes it to Red Inkstone in Between Noble and Humble, trans. Liangmei Bao (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 181. note: Variant translations: note: Every word [in the novel] which one looks at is a drop of blood. The ten years ' painstaking labour is no commonplace.
Fonte: From On The Red Chamber Dream by Shichang Wu (Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 24