Madeleine Thien Quotes

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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