Madeleine Thien Quotes

#1. How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before

Madeleine Thien

#2. The concerto's beauty was even more impassioned than he remembered, and also more piteous and quiet and restrained, and he clasped his hands together to absorb both the grief and joy in his body.

Madeleine Thien

#3. It's foolhardy to think that a story ends

Madeleine Thien

#4. 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.

Madeleine Thien

#5. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday. She

Madeleine Thien

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

Madeleine Thien

#7. When she returned, she was full of life, impassioned. She seemed to want change, within herself, between them, and she believed all things were possible. She said that the past was not static, our memories fold and bend, we change with every step taken into the future.

Madeleine Thien

#8. Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood.

Madeleine Thien

#9. It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

Madeleine Thien

#10. She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn't the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.

Madeleine Thien

#11. People aren't made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we'll forget what we are, we'll lose ourselves without even noticing.

Madeleine Thien

#12. 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.

Madeleine Thien

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

Madeleine Thien

#14. He kisses her, and she knows, somehow, that he is asking for help, for an end to the sadness they are causing one another. Asking because, after all these years together, it is the only thing that might save them.

Madeleine Thien

#15. 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?

Madeleine Thien

#16. 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.

Madeleine Thien

#17. 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.

Madeleine Thien

#18. What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?

Madeleine Thien

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

Madeleine Thien

#20. music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, if we faithfully remember all the words, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.

Madeleine Thien

#21. He remembered Bertolt Brecht: I would also like to be wise. In the old books it says what wisdom is: To shun the strife of the world and to live out Your brief time without fear All this I cannot do.

Madeleine Thien

#22. What must it feel like, I wondered, to begin again? Would I still be the same person if I woke up in a different language and another existence?

Madeleine Thien