Best 19 quotes of Madeleine Thien on MyQuotes

I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating.

But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

I assumed that when the story finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn't true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. "But that's how the world is, isn't it?

If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another?

If you're trapped in a room, and nobody is coming to save you, what can you do? You have to bang on the walls and break the windows. You have to climb out and save yourself. It's obvious, Li-ling, that crying doesn't help a person live.

I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.

In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up ↑ and we fall ↓ asleep and we sink ↓ into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake is to cross a border towards consciousness → and to faint is to go back ← . Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is “the year above” ↑ and next year is “the year below” ↓. The day before yesterday is the day “in front” ↑ and the day after tomorrow is the day “behind” ↓. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore, to look into the future one must turn around...

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

I've got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They're good noodles but they won't change the world.

I wondered: what happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?

Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!

She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?

Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.

The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy.

The young man murmured in his sleep and said, “Dear Sparrow,” and Sparrow felt, for the first time, how the purest joy could be a heaviness.

Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep.

What happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?