Top 100 Ken Liu Quotes
#1. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.
Ken Liu
#2. The emperor is just a man, after all.
Ken Liu
#3. The more perfect the ideals, the less ideal the methods.
Ken Liu
#4. Like all true stories, it was a mix of legends and facts, of myths imagined and deeds done, of the heart of darkness and the crown of light, of experiences borne and gaps filled, of things seen and visions that could only be authenticated by the mind's eye.
Ken Liu
#5. All life is an experiment.
Ken Liu
#6. History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.
Ken Liu
#7. The past is a country to which one cannot return
Ken Liu
#8. I have seen the poor suffer when nobles seek the purity of ideals. I have seen the powerless die when princes believe in the nostalgia of their dreams. I have seen the common people torn from peace and thrown into war when kings yearn to test the clarity of their vision.
Ken Liu
#9. Surveillance is surveillance. I can never understand why some people think it matters whether it's the government doing it to you or a company.
Ken Liu
#10. Sometimes it was hard to tell where the performance ended and the real self began - but what was this "real" self other than a set of performances?
Ken Liu
#11. Some have said I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.
Ken Liu
#12. She may be from the sky, yet she is not so strange after all.
Ken Liu
#13. A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. "Now
Ken Liu
#14. Old friends are like old clothes: they fit the best.
Ken Liu
#15. The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.
Ken Liu
#16. Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could no longer see himself.
Ken Liu
#17. We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives.
Ken Liu
#18. Even a brilliant mind sometimes needs a dull stone to sharpen itself.
Ken Liu
#19. There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.
Ken Liu
#20. There is often no line between perfection and evil.
Ken Liu
#21. There is a time for flight, and a time for descent; a time for movement, and a time for rest; a time to do, and a time to prepare." "This
Ken Liu
#22. Miss Lilly." Mr. Kan stood up and solemnly shook her hand. "When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. It's destiny that brings us together. I hope you will always think of me and Teddy as your friends.
Ken Liu
#23. Could the stories that parents tell children to lull them to sleep actually be true?
Ken Liu
#24. Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.
Ken Liu
#25. Mazoti said nothing. It always seemed that no matter how hard a woman worked, a man could eclipse her with no effort. "Gin,
Ken Liu
#26. A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.
Ken Liu
#27. You will have sacrificed the lives of the people for personal honor, an empty word," Luan said. "That seems to me a most selfish act.
Ken Liu
#28. she likes the sound of languages other than English.
Ken Liu
#29. A man who can kill several people with a sword is merely a living weapon. A great warrior can kill thousands of men with just his mind.
Ken Liu
#30. It is as if the Caru'ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed.
Ken Liu
#31. She imagined Kuni and Risana together, and despite herself, she was consumed with fury.
Ken Liu
#32. If you insist on fighting every fight that comes your way, you're simply letting them push you around in a different way.
Ken Liu
#33. The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.
Ken Liu
#34. The forest hugged Aomori
Ken Liu
#35. Honored Big Sister," said Risana, "my heart is glad to finally be in your presence." "I should thank you, Little Sister," Jia said, "for taking care of our husband all this time. His letters never mentioned how beautiful you are." The two women smiled at each other.
Ken Liu
#36. A knife is not malicious merely because it is sharp, and a plot is not evil merely because it is effective. All depends on the wielder. The grace of kings is not the same as the morals governing individuals.
Ken Liu
#37. I've always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.
Ken Liu
#38. This investment may well pay off a hundredfold someday." "You
Ken Liu
#39. Kuni didn't change his tone at all. If anything, he grew even calmer. "These cartoons are very amateurish. I could show Namen many more tricks about how to insult people artfully. For example, the drawings could have been made much more subtle and also much more lewd." "What?
Ken Liu
#40. If someone had informed him that men were dying every day in the Islands for lack of a cup of rice, he would have been surprised. "Why do they insist on eating rice? Meat is so much better!
Ken Liu
#41. A loyal servant does not think of things outside of his control.
Ken Liu
#42. Maybe Soto was right. It was silly to make a fetish out of love, and not to accept that love was like food, and each dish had its own flavor. The heart surely had room for more than one.
Ken Liu
#43. There is far more happiness in a life that is your own than a life in which you are handed the lines to say and shown the gestures to make. Do not ever be ambitious.
Ken Liu
#44. Emperor Erishi had let his bladder go. The guards dropped their swords.
Ken Liu
#45. We suffer because we are the grass upon which giants tread.
Ken Liu
#46. One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker.
Ken Liu
#47. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure. Ruth
Ken Liu
#48. Everyone marched as fast or slow as he liked.
Ken Liu
#49. The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.
Ken Liu
#50. We have children because we can't remember our own first taste of ambrosia." I can't
Ken Liu
#51. Sometimes those who lit the spark that began a conflagration must be consumed by it lest the fire burn on indefinitely.
Ken Liu
#52. The character for 'mob' is formed from the character for 'nobility' on one side and the character for 'sheep' on the other. So that's what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause.
Ken Liu
#53. ...reading is literally hearing the voice of the past.
Ken Liu
#54. I didn't know this at the time, but Mom's kind was special. She breathed into them so that they shared her breath, and thus moved with her life. This was her magic.
Ken Liu
#55. As the wind continued to howl and groan through her decaying body, she began to sing her story.
Ken Liu
#56. Read a lot of books and try a lot of recipes," Jia said. "When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.
Ken Liu
#57. You can't tell how high a kite can fly without being willing to let all the string out.
Ken Liu
#58. A lord who knows how to wield men is ten times more fearsome than one who knows only how to wield a sword.
Ken Liu
#59. The body is intelligent, I think. It knows how to say what it means to be alive better than the mind ever will.
Ken Liu
#60. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.
Ken Liu
#61. So let us no more think of being compared to women as an insult." It
Ken Liu
#62. But in a time of war, knowledge made interesting friendships. Soon, the scholars and the thieves were . . . well, thick as thieves.
Ken Liu
#63. Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience.
Ken Liu
#64. But it's not really Chinese, is it?'
Logan was thoughtful for a moment. "I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.
Ken Liu
#65. We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves - they're the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.
Ken Liu
#66. What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?
Ken Liu
#67. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.
Ken Liu
#68. It's easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they're poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood. Remember that, Rat.
Ken Liu
#69. There are no monsters. The monster is us.
Ken Liu
#70. Sometimes, the anger built up so much that people had to scream out their treasonous thoughts just to keep on breathing. Maybe not all of the were really crazy, but it was best for everyone involved to pretend that they were.
Ken Liu
#71. He was like a seed still tethered to the withered flower, just waiting for the dead air of the late summer evening to break, for the storm to begin.
Ken Liu
#72. Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.
Ken Liu
#73. Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.
Ken Liu
#74. Getting a title is easy. It's keeping it that's hard.
Ken Liu
#75. He would measure the world against the rigid grid of his heart and put each man in charge of a domain no more and no less than his just deserts.
Ken Liu
#76. You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It's for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone.
Ken Liu
#77. The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial - the truth only dies when true stories are untold.
Ken Liu
#78. What is so bad about being compared to women?" Kuni said. "Half the world is made of women.
Ken Liu
#79. Safety is an illusion, as is faith without temptation. We're imperfect, unlike the gods, but in that imperfection we may yet make them jealous.
Ken Liu
#80. fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
Ken Liu
#81. Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
Ken Liu
#82. The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.
Ken Liu
#83. Pockets of sentience glow in the cold, deep void of the universe like bubbles in a vast, dark sea.
Ken Liu
#84. I would like a window seat," I said, imagining the stars streaming by.
Ken Liu
#85. But Mata understood that Jizu had been made into something like a saint, a symbol around which people could rally. Such symbols were the most dangerous because they could be made to say whatever those who held the symbol wished.
Ken Liu
#86. Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.
Ken Liu
#87. There's never going to be an end to suffering if 'he deserves it' is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.
Ken Liu
#88. There was a tendency by some to romanticize love, to make a fetish out of it. The poets made love seem like a bar of iron coming out of the furnace at the blacksmith's, red hot and staying so forever. Soto did not think much of such notions.
Ken Liu
#89. Time's arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
Ken Liu
#90. Who can plan so far ahead? I just promise myself to do the most interesting thing every time there's an opportunity.
Ken Liu
#91. As the moon rose, I saw the light illuminate an ancient quote from the Ano Classics, carved into one of the broken lintels: 'All life is an experiment.
Ken Liu
#92. We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we're enmeshed.
Ken Liu
#93. Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear?
Ken Liu
#95. Aren't you afraid?" I asked. "I almost died before I could begin to remember.
Ken Liu
#96. All life is an experiment.'" "A
Ken Liu
#97. Love, or the lack of it, is not within my domains of expertise.
Ken Liu
#98. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.
Ken Liu
#99. A bird needs both long and short feathers to fly," said Jia. "You need to learn to work with different kinds of people." Kuni nodded, glad of Jia's wisdom.
Ken Liu
#100. I do have the consolation that my enjoyment brings no death and suffering; when I die no one will jump up and down in joy; and I remember all the names and faces that matter to me." Mata
Ken Liu
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