Quotes from Madeleine Thien

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.

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

It's foolhardy to think that a story ends

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?

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.

Don't ever try to be only a single thing, an unbroken human being. If so many people love you, can you honestly be one thing?

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

Sound had a freedom that no thought could equal because a sound made no absolute claim on meaning. Any word, on the other hand, could be forced to signify its opposite.

But was a miracle still a miracle if it came too late?

What happens when a hundred thousand people memorize the same poem? Does anything change?

But what was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go.

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.

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? What answer would my father give?

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.

And suddenly I was in the car with my father. I heard rain splashing up over the tires and my father, humming. He was so alive, so beloved, that the incomprehensibility of his suicide grieved me all over again. By then, my father had been dead for two decades, and such a pure memory of him had never come back to me.

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.

Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep.

And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered to help them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.

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 changing yesterday.

The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that live invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

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.

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.

If they want to come for you, they will come, and it doesn't matter what you read or what you failed to read. The books on your shelves, the music you cherish, the past lives you've lived, all these details are just an excuse.