56 Quotes by Madeleine Thien

I wondered: 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?

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.

Solitude can reshape your life. Like a river that gets cut off from the sea. You think it’s moving somewhere, but it’s not. You can drown inside yourself.

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.

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.

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?

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

Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!