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.

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

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.

He remembered 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 All this I cannot do.

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.

And yet throughout the world, past and present, for thousands of years, those whom we call good men, righteous men, have been accustomed to the sight of such things, have sat and looked and considered them to be matters of course, have not demanded justice for the victims or offered to help them. This is the most appalling, unjust, and unequal thing, the most inexplicable theory under heaven.

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

It was a time of chaos, of bombs and floods, when love songs streamed from the radios and wept down the streets. Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before.

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.