Tan Twan Eng Quotes

#1. One question remained to me. "If a higher level of bujutsu involves fighting with the mind, what then is the very highest level?" He closed his eyes for a while, seeing things he would never show me. "That," he said, "would be never to fight at all.

Tan Twan Eng

#2. Below these words was the garden's name in English: EVENING MISTS. I felt I was about to enter a place that existed only in the overlapping of air and water, light and time.

Tan Twan Eng

#3. We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.

Tan Twan Eng

#4. Accept that there are things in this world we can never explain and life will be understandable. That is the irony of life. It is also the beauty of it.

Tan Twan Eng

#5. The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of man

Tan Twan Eng

#6. That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. Mono no aware, the Japanese call it.

Tan Twan Eng

#7. Die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.

Tan Twan Eng

#8. Was this part of the process of growing up, that we finally noticed the people closest to us in a different, clearer light?

Tan Twan Eng

#9. Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.

Tan Twan Eng

#10. There are some people...who might feel that such practices are misguided, like trying to wield heaven's powers on earth. And yet it was only in the carefully planned and created garden of Yugiri that I had found a sense of order and calm and even, for a brief moment of time, forgetfulness.

Tan Twan Eng

#11. A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.

Tan Twan Eng

#12. On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the emperor of Japan.

Tan Twan Eng

#13. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.

Tan Twan Eng

#14. Time seems to overlap, like the shadows of leave pressing down on other leave, layer upon layer.

Tan Twan Eng

#15. It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond's skin.

Tan Twan Eng

#16. Time is eating away my memory. Time, and this illness, this trespasser in my brain.

Tan Twan Eng

#17. The young have hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what has happened to their lives.

Tan Twan Eng

#18. Yes, I could say that I had lived my life, if not to the full then at least almost to the brim. What more could one ask? Rare is the person whose life overflows.

Tan Twan Eng

#19. Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped?

Tan Twan Eng

#20. Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.

Tan Twan Eng

#21. Feel your body expanding as you breathe: that is where we live, in the moments between each inhalation and exhalation.

Tan Twan Eng

#22. The mountains are as I have always remembered them, the first light of the morning melting down their flanks.

Tan Twan Eng

#23. I had loaded another weight onto his suffering and it hurt me to understand that while one person can never really share the pain of another, they can so easily and so heedlessly add to it.

Tan Twan Eng

#24. Enlightenment, it is a moment of complete clarity, of pure bliss. At that instant everything will be revealed to you.

Tan Twan Eng

#25. In return for surrendering to the throw, you are given the gift of flight,' he said.

Tan Twan Eng

#26. I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void.

Tan Twan Eng

#27. entire cottage industry centered just on Aritomo-sensei,

Tan Twan Eng

#28. The tree of life is already doomed from the moment it is planted.

Tan Twan Eng

#29. Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way.

Tan Twan Eng

#30. Duty is a concept created by emperors and generals to deceive us into performing their will. Be wary when duty speaks, for it often masks the voice of others.

Tan Twan Eng

#31. Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analysing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

Tan Twan Eng

#32. I can only teach you the way, that is all. What you do with it and what it does to you, those are beyond my influence.

Tan Twan Eng

#33. The mind forgets, but the heart will always remember. And what is the heart's memory but love itself?

Tan Twan Eng

#34. Teacher, as he was called, looked tiny, childlike, and deceptively vulnerable.

Tan Twan Eng

#35. A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.

Tan Twan Eng

#36. Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again.

Tan Twan Eng

#37. It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor.

Tan Twan Eng

#38. To have memories, happy or sorrowful, is a blessing, for it shows we have lived our lives without reservation.

Tan Twan Eng

#39. We're the only ones left from those withered days. The last two leaves still clinging to the branch waiting to fall. Waiting for the wind to severe us into the sky.

Tan Twan Eng

#40. Anything beautiful should be given a name, do you not agree?

Tan Twan Eng

#41. My eyes wondered from one end of the mountains to the other. 'Do you think they go on forever?'
'The mountains?' Aritomo said, as though he had been asked that question before. 'They fade away. Like all things.

Tan Twan Eng

#42. When you are lost in this world, or on the continent of time itself,remember who you have been and you will know who you are

Tan Twan Eng