Quotes from Madeleine Thien

I felt she saw into me, past every facade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes in one's life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another.

Q: How do you tell an extroverted mathematician from an introverted one? A: An extroverted mathematician stares at your shoes when talking to you.

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.

Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!

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.

What shook Ling the most was that she wasn't even angry. Anger, too, could dissipate, but this emptiness that took its place might never be released.

She told me I possessed what every great mathematician required, an excellent memory and a sense of poetry. I felt she saw into me, past every façade and flourish, and that the more she knew me, the more she loved me. I was too young, then, to know how lasting this kind of love is, how rarely it comes into one's life, how difficult it is to accept oneself, let alone another. I carried this security--Ai-ming's love, the love of an older sister--out of my childhood and into my adult life.

Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

Kai, she thought, you are as lost as I am. You have no idea where this beauty comes from and you know better than to think that such clarity could come from your own heart. Maybe, like Sparrow, Kai was terrified that one day the sound would shut off.

For all her talent, and for all of Kai's, it was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

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.

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.

revolutionary music hurts the ears after awhile. There's no nostalgia in it, no place for people to share their sorrows. Of course," Big Mother continued hurriedly,

When I looked at my university classmates, I heard in their voices and saw in their lives a freedom I felt had been unfairly taken from me. How oblivious they seemed of their good fortune. I compensated by studying harder, by trying to outdo everyone, to defy—what? I didn't know. It's no wonder that I became such a solitary young woman.

At the bottom of all these tangled impressions she glimpsed a changed idea, another way of loving someone that she had not experienced before, an attachment like that to a brother, to a friend, to a lover who could never be her lover, of a musical soulmate, a companion who might have been a lifelong collaborator.

I assumed that when the story 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 Big Mother this, she laughed her head off. "But that's how the world is, isn't it?

In fact, the way to punish someone might be to remove them from their circle of family and friends, isolate them in a cold country, and shatter them with loneliness.

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.

It was very modern and deeply western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires, to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society.

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.

did I yearn for a new eye as a window to the outside world, or for the world to look in on me?

Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.

She did not know how or why, but now that she understood, now that she had come to a decision, the old fears had drained away.

nce each year, my father used to take us to the symphony. We never had good seats but Ba said it didn't matter, the point was to be there, to exist in the room while music, however old it might be, was being renewed.