Famous Quotes & Sayings

Madeleine Thien Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 36 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Madeleine Thien.

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Famous Quotes By Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1244197

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

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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

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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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 792987

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1108538

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1309679

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

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 2176996

After surgery, he told his doctors that the pain was exactly as it was, but he did not feel it as greatly. "It's as if," he had said, a cool blandness in his eyes, "the pain is not being done to me." One day, maybe in a ten years, or fifty years, a surgeon will be able to do this with disturbing precision, destroy a whirlpool of memory, an entire system of feelings, but in the meantime it's like taking a hatchet to a spider's web. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 431527

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1201227

I assumed," Ai-ming told me, "that when Big Mother's stories 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 my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, 'But that's how the world is, isn't it? Or did you think you were bigger than the world? — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 243759

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 219228

It's foolhardy to think that a story ends — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 227348

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

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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

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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

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He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence? — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1822105

But for anything to be alive, it required motion : the current must run, the record must turn, a person must leave or find another path. Without movement or change, the world became nothing more than a stale copy, and this was the trouble with Ba's elegant calligraphy, his patient life, it was frozen in time. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1779339

Watch little by little the night turn around. Echoes in the house; want to go up, dare not. A glow behind the screen; wish to go through, cannot. It would hurt too much, to see the swallow on her hairpin. Truly shame me, to see the phoenix in her mirror. To Hengtang I return at dawn Fading like light on a jewelled saddle. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1777475

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

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The things you experience," she continued, "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----copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy. I have devoted my miniscule life to the act of copying. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1648952

Light from the tanks found him, as if they could collect all the irreconcilable parts of his life. No matter how many lights they shone, they could never take away the darkness. Daylight was blinding, but in the dark he still existed. What did they see, he wondered, his hands still open. Of all the people he had loved and who had loved him, of all the things that he had witnessed, lived and hoped for, of all the music he had created, how much was it possible to see? — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1527259

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1454091

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1432214

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings. — Madeleine Thien

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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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1261629

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 297229

Here Tchaikovsky was, writing to one brother about the composition of his famous Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35: "It goes without saying that I would have been able to do nothing without him. He plays it marvellously. When he caresses me with his hand, when he lies with his head inclined on my breast, and I run my hand through his hair and secretly kiss it . . . passion rages within me with such unimaginable strength. . . ." Sparrow — Madeleine Thien

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Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father's music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai's most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 1027097

Was there anyone in this world who could taste something delicious-economic freedom and political reform-a taste that was salty and fattening and sweet and promising, and only be satisfied with one mouthful? Who would wait patiently for nearly a billion people to also have a taste? No, anyone would try to get a second mouthful, a third, a whole bowl for themselves. — Madeleine Thien

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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

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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

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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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 776892

I promise you that for all our life together, I will seek worlds that we might never have encountered in our singularity and our solitude. I will shelter our family. I will share your tears. I will bind my happiness to yours. Our country is about to be born. Let us, too, have the chance to begin again. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 742771

She says that she held on to the memory as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her. She knows, has always believed, that there is a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood. In the last few months, she has felt as if, day by day, she is losing her footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over. — Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien Quotes 709514

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

Madeleine Thien Quotes 630542

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