56 Quotes by Madeleine Thien

The present is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

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?

She said the music made her wonder, Does it alter us more to be heard, or to hear?

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.

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.

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 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.

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

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite?