Quotes from Madeleine Thien

Once 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.

You think that the things that matter are more difficult than words - to retreat from a confrontation, for instance, to work at changing something, truly changing something." She lifted her hand toward the bodies and the tanks. "Ai-ming, you're studying history to prepare for the examinations. What if revolution and violence are the only way?

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.

How did Yiwen see her? Was she a sister, a friend, a confidant, something else? Here is the one thing in my life, Ai-Ming thought, that has no parameters. She wanted to tell Yiwen how she felt, but she was afraid to damage everything they had.

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

She wanted to tell them 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 it wasn't the party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions.

Big Mother walked home from the bus station, through the rowdy twilit streets, and the novel in her bag gave her a pleasant, illusory calm, as if she were leaving a secret meeting and the documents she carried could bring down systems, countries, lies and corruption.

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.

Sometimes I think you can look at a person and know they are full of words.

When acquaintances met him on the road, Wen said he couln't stop to discuss the Communists or Nationalists, Stalin, Truman or the weather, because he was composing a six-character eight line regulated verse in his head, and any variation in his path wuld push the words out of order. It was a lie. In fact, he was empty of poetry a d afraid of words.

Surely another story could serve the same purpose, and lift her out of her solitude.

It embarassed her ow, the way she bruned candles so unthikingly, gazing at words that seemed to hide ideas, or ideas inexpressible in words, how the sentences had carried her forwards like a river or a piece of music. And yet how close the truth had seemed back then. She had been twenty-four years old and she had fallen in love.

But Sparrow remembered every word as if the brief letter was a poem or Bach partita. He could stand up and deliver it now, word for word, note for note.

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.

Was this what music was, was it time itself containing fractions of seconds, minutes, hours, and all the ages, all the generations?

Was this a real story, Sparrow had wondered, or was it something like the book of records, an imagines survival?

His sonata for piano and violin, he first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could not do more. He made a clean copy, isnged his name and wrote the date, May, 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People's Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai. [...] He saw himself walking out of the room, this alleyway, this city, without turning back. The following morning, he put on his uniform and returned to work

What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?

Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. 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 wanted to ask Kai if he loved Sparrow for who he was, or if it was his talent that was the true attraction. Didn't he understand that a gift like Sparrow's could not be bought or borrowed, it could not be stolen? Did Kai love the person, or did he love what Sparrow's music made him feel? Her own thoughts surprised and upset her?

How did a person know, he wondered, what was love and what was a facsimile of it? Did it matter? Was the thing that mattered most the action that one took - or failed to take - in the name of that feeling?

IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love.

There was Glenn Gould hunched over the piano, wearing a dark suit, hearing patterns far beyond the range of what most of us are given to perceive,

When the mind is exalted, the body is lightened and feels as if it could float in the wind.