56 Quotes by Madeleine Thien

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

I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.

It’s only now, in hindsight, that I think she saw her own disappearance as a quality to be desired. That perhaps she needed, finally, to live unobserved.

I like to think of home as a verb, something we keep recreating.

He’d been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

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.

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.

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.

What happened if you melted a person down layer by layer? What if there was nothing between the layers, and nothing at the centre, only quiet?